Blog - www.richardjespers.com

Oh, Strout Wins with 'William'

11/18/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy—which many believe goes hand in hand with it—will be dead as well.
Margaret Atwood
Author of The Handmaid's Tale
Born November 18, 1939

M. Atwood

My Book World

Strout, Elizabeth. Oh William! New York: Random, 2021.

“Oh William!” becomes, before this novel is over, rather a poetic refrain uttered by the female narrator, Lucy Barton—a longtime figure in Strout’s fiction. Lucy and William marry when they are very young, then divorce after a number of years. They both remarry, and yet both remain in the lives of the children they’ve brought into the world as well. Strout travels back and forth through time so seamlessly that one is never lost in or by the narrative. It turns out that Lucy, like her creator, is also a successful writer, but Lucy carries a lot of baggage with her. So does William. Poor parenting they received in developmental years. Poverty of various kinds. And it is a good thing that they remain friends because after Lucy’s second husband dies and after William is left alone, they turn to each other to help the other through life’s difficulties as they age into their seventies. A very affecting book by one of my favorite authors.

Coming Next:
TUES 11/29: A Writer's Wit | Sue Miller
WEDS 11/30: A Writer's Wit | Mark Twain
THURS 12/01: A Writer's Wit | World AIDS Day Observance
FRI 12/02: My Book World | Sarah M. Wagner's Swan Wife

Pat Conroy: No Exaggeration Needed

11/11/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
The only way to know what is possible is to venture past impossible.
Mary Gaitskill
Author of This Is Pleasure
Born November 11, 1954

M. Gaitskill

My Book World

Clark, Katherine. My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy. As Told to Katherine Clark. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2018.

I don’t usually care for “as told to” books, but this one is too intriguing to pass up. Clark spends a number of years communicating with author Pat Conroy either by direct interviews or by way of written communications. He declares early on that his spoken language is much different from the prose he uses in his fiction. And his fiction (for those who don’t know Conroy)? The Great Santini. The Lords of Discipline. Beach Music, to name only a few.

Each book that Conroy writes is his way of transforming the mess that is his autobiographical material. The Great Santini is essentially about his bully of an abusive father who cows Conroy’s mother and all his siblings. The Lords of Discipline is about his four years as a miserable cadet at the Citadel, in South Carolina. But his writing is also about his three marriages. His parents. His children. He writes, by the way, The Water Is Wide, the novel about a young man who teaches on an island with an all-Black classroom of children—made into a successful movie, Conrack, starring Jon Voight. In fact, Conroy makes a great deal of his income from selling the film rights to his works and getting a successful result—a rarity among novelists.

I am much more encouraged to read Conroy’s oeuvre, in part, because I can now sense how difficult it is for him to arrive at each finished product. He is one of those persons who must fight for every minute of happiness, every inch of success, and Clark’s book relates his story plainly and with great sensitivity.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Georgia O'Keeffe
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | George S. Kaufman
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lee Strasberg
FRI: My Book World | Elizabeth Strout's Oh, William!

Lone Star Short Stories: Two Books

11/4/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
I'm not an artist. I tell inappropriate stories and jokes and I try to make people laugh.
Kathy Griffin
For Your Consideration (CD)
Born November 4, 1960

K. Griffin

My Book World

Byrd, Bobby, and Johnny Byrd, editors. Lone Star Noir. New York: Akashic, 2010.

These fourteen stories, though set in the singular locale of Texas, are about the same things that noir is about in the other forty-nine states: avarice, greed, murder. Thus, making the collection rather universal. Divided into three parts—rural Texas, urban Texas, and Gulf-Coast Texas—each story brings to life those three qualities. Noir allows readers to experience this thrilling but illicit word vicariously so that we never ever have to commit such crimes ourselves. Title is part of the Akashic Noir Series.

Peery, William, Editor. 21 Texas Short Stories. Austin: U of Texas P, 1954.

These twenty-one stories written by Texans (either by birth or by successful transplantation) were published between the early 1940s and the mid-1950s. But many of them chronicle earlier times, calling to mind rural-agrarian, nineteenth century Texas, calling to mind Texas’s involvement in the Civil War and slavery. Editor Peery features some famous names: O. Henry, Katherine Anne Porter, J. Frank Dobie, and Fred Gipson. But he also includes many fine writers who do not possess that kind of fame. Margaret Cousins, for example, may write the best, non-sentimental Christmas story I’ve ever read. “Uncle Edgar and the Reluctant Saint” tells the tale of a little girl who almost doesn’t get to celebrate Christmas with her family due to her train getting stuck in a freakish Texas snow storm. Her curmudgeon of an uncle happens to be on the train, a man who detests marriage, Christmas, and almost everything else that is part of civilization. He manages to come through for her and everyone else on the train without changing his character too much. All the stories reveal diction and dialog that are no longer used (probably), sort of Huck Finn meets the Texas State Fair. Worth the time, especially if you are interested in Texas folklore.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Marianne Wiggins
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Carroll Quigley
THURS: A Writer's Wit | John P. Marquand
FRI: My Book World | Elizabeth Clark's Biography: My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

Vietnam: 'Bright Shining Lie'

10/28/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums . . . who find prison so soul destroying.
Evelyn Waugh
Author of Brideshead Revisited
Born October 28, 1903

E. Waugh

My Book World

Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Random, 1988.

One might wonder how the story of a single man might also tell the complete story of a war that that man participates in. Yet that is precisely what the late journalist and author Neil Sheehan does in his award-winning book, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. John Paul Vann might be a larger-than-life character if indeed he were a larger-than-life person. He is not. And Sheehan takes great pains to explain to readers Vann’s poverty-stricken childhood, one in which Vann (his adopted name) is born out of wedlock and would rather take the name of his stepfather than the name of the father who brings shame upon him (although he does become acquainted with the man later). Vann begins his wannabee life by earning a good education. He is always about self-improvement as far as his career is concerned and seeks more degrees even while working full time. At a personal level, Van remains a mess for the remainder of his life. His early poverty, the rejection of him by his mother, always plays a role in his judgment.

John Paul Vann commits a crime he ultimately gets away with (he does no jail time) because his wife testifies on his behalf and because he teaches himself to beat the military’s polygraph machine—another blemish on his larger-than-life image. Yet the existence of this trial dogs him as he attempts to climb the military ladder of success via the back door (certainly not West point). Vann places career before his wife and children. He allows his voracious sexual appetite (as many as three acts of coitus a day in his forties) commands him to do whatever necessary to satisfy it: lie, cheat, manipulate. He all but divorces his wife (and children) to accommodate his promiscuity, keeping secret from each other the lives of his Vietnamese lover and (illegal) wife.

Yet all the while Vann possesses an honest and accurate perception of the Vietnam War beginning early on in the 1950s. He perceives that the U.S. military complex, since its recent victories with World War II, develops an arrogance that keeps its leadership from assessing the Vietnam War honestly. Army leaders refuse to learn anything about Vietnam: its centuries-long battles to fight off (successfully) foreign invaders. It refuses to realize that South Vietnam government is weak and corrupt and as such never fights the North with full force. It refuses to realize that the Vietnam people are one and that often the enemy looks like the ally and vice-versa.

The Battle of Ap Bac, in 1962, is one in which everything that can go wrong does go wrong—the American Army losing hundreds of lives in spite of its military “superiority.” The Viet Cong (North Vietnam Communists) capture abandoned U.S. equipment, expensive weaponry, and use them against the South supported by the U.S. military. Miliary leaders fail to realize Vietnam is one country, that it cannot be divided as North Korea was. The people pass back and forth over the imagined line of the 38th Parallel undetected. Vann ultimately believes that how Vietnam determines its future ought to be up to its people, a struggle that, even if it turns to Communism, is not the business of the United States. There is no such thing as the so-called Domino Theory. The lives and money being spent for nearly two decades are a wasted expense, to say the least.

And yet, Vann, up until the very last of his career, continues to believe that with his superior leadership, the war can be won—even after the Tet Offensive and other failures. In June 1972, unable to obtain the service of his usual helicopter pilot, Vann makes an ill-advised night flight in fog with an inexperienced twenty-six-year-old pilot and all occupants crash to their deaths, Vann believing until the end that he has won the war. It will not end, of course, for several more years, in 1975, when the U.S. finally admits defeat and vacates the decimated country.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Jessica Valenti
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Thomas Mallon
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Walker Evans
FRI: My Book World | Lone Star Short Stories: Two Books

Ackerley's 'Hindoo Holiday'

10/21/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
All reduction of people to objects, all imposition of labels and patterns to which they must conform, all segregation can lead only to destruction.
Maureen Duffy
Author of The Microcosm
Born October 21, 1933

M. Duffy

My Book World

Ackerley, Joe Randolph. Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal. With an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. New York: NYRB, 2000 (1932).

As a young man in his thirties, Ackerley visits India for a protracted amount of time. This book is essentially his diary of what takes place. As out as he can be for his time, Ackerley has no problem stating his admiration for a handsome man. He is not, however, a typical British tourist. He lives the life, hiring a young man to tutor him in the language. The man turns out to be more of a pest, always conniving to extract money or favors from Ackerley, like a pesky dog begging for scraps. But Ackerley learns enough to get by. He also learns the intricacies of the Hindu religion, finding, as with Christians, that some believers practice it with a certain flexibility or laxity. A still entertaining book these many decades later.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Anne Tyler
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Gelek Rimpoche
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Fran Lebowitz
FRI: My Book World | Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Van and America in Vietnam

'Demon Inside' Is Old Story

10/14/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
Hannah Arendt
Author of
Born October 14, 1906

H. Arendt

My Book World

Wedgwood, Barbara. The Demon Inside. New York: Simon, 1993.

A sad but true story. Made sadder by the fact that I attended graduate school with the two principals: Walker Railey and Margaret “Peggy” Nicolai Railey. My young wife (at the time) and I entertained them in our efficiency apartment on the campus of Southern Methodist University. I was both a seminarian where I met Walker, as well as a student of graduate music, where I studied with the same organ professor as Peggy who was enrolled in the master of music program. The couple were about to be married, effervescent and fun to be with. After I left seminary, withdrawing before I graduated, I never saw them again. I only heard of them when their story hit the national news. I had left the church and divorced my wife, leaving the seminary life far behind. They were figures I no longer seemed to know.

I was aware of this book when it came out, but I was not interested in reading it at the time. Somewhat like learning about the Clutter family in the news (I grew up in Kansas), I had grown tired of hearing about whether Walker Railey had strangled his wife of ten years or not. In that she didn’t die as a result of the attempt but remained an invalid for more than twenty-five years, dying at the age of sixty-three, she remained frozen in time for me: a pretty, intelligent and gifted musician. Witty and with a mind of her own.

I read Wedgwood’s book with a wary eye when I noted in her foreword that she was a Dallasite who had grown up in the city’s First Methodist Church located downtown. Even though she’d left the area to pursue a more global career and life, I wondered how objective she might be. She also knew or seemed to know of many of the principals in the story: other Methodist ministers and spouses, Methodist bishops, and the like. But for the most part, I was impressed with her fanaticism for detail, almost too much at times (offering much more than a thumbnail sketch of minor characters, for example). All the dialogue, she claims, is lifted from “sworn testimony, quotations from newspapers and magazines or the recollections of two observers of a scene or one of the participants in a dialogue” (xi). She allows for the mistaken or distorted memories of people when recalling even such a traumatic event as this one.

But one element is missing. Facts. Walker Railey consistently refused to speak with law enforcement, except briefly, all the while claiming he was innocent. And, of course, Peggy Railey could no longer speak for herself—nothing more than a drooling ghoul the strangler had created the night of the attack. One time, early in her time at the Dallas hospital, she “woke” momentarily from her coma, ostensibly upon hearing the voice of her husband standing at the foot of her bed, and seemed startled. The older child, Ryan, five, had suffered some injury, the attacker apparently pushing him away from the scene, but he was too young ever to positively identify the violent intruder. Those events may be as close as the public ever gets to knowing the truth. A strange and lurid case made markedly so because it takes place within the context of one of the country’s largest churches of one Protestantism’s most established denominations. As the title suggests, the demon remains within, within the realm of its own story, perhaps never to be set free.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Wendy Wasserstein
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Dan Flores
THURS: A Writer's Wit | John Dewey
FRI: My Book World | J. R. Ackerley's Hindoo Holiday

'The Dutch House" a Big Novel

10/7/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Today’s lynching is a felony charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration. Today’s lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, “I’m going to hang you up and burn you.” Once you get that F, you’re on fire.
Michelle Alexander
Author of The New Jim Crow
Born October 7, 1967

M. Alexander

My Book World

Patchett, Ann. The Dutch House: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2019.

If readers want to ascertain the entire plot of this novel, they can consult Wikipedia; it’s otherwise too complex and contains too many spoilers. Danny Conroy, who happens to have graduated high school and college the same years I did, narrates this engrossing but compressed epic about him and his sister, Maeve (in my head I keep seeing the beautiful Maeve character created by Emma Mackey in Netflix’s Sex Education). The brother and sister experience a sort of orphanhood when first their biological mother leaves them as young children—to serve as a missionary in India.

They experience it again when their father dies and their truly wicked stepmother banishes them from their home, the Dutch House of Elkins Park, Philadelphia—the home built in 1920 and probably serving as the central character of the book. Both times, the siblings must serve as parents to each other because they simply have no one else (except for three kind servants who have no legal authority). This intimacy is both helpful and harmful to them: Maeve never marries, and Danny’s wife always feels she’s competing for Danny’s attention. Danny’s role as narrator is similar to the role that Nick Carraway takes in The Great Gatsby, except that Danny’s account is more or less reliable, marred perhaps only by depending on his childhood memories which, in many cases, are distorted by the hurt of abandonment. In all, the novel is a satisfying read, worthy of its nomination for a Pulitzer. It is one of those you could sit up all night reading and fall asleep in the morning quite satisfied, book clutched to your chest.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Eleanor Roosevelt
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Richard Price
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lenny Bruce
FRI: My Book World | Barbara Wedgwood's The Demon Inside

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