FRIDAY: My Book World | J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip
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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
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
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
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
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
My Book World Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Riverhead, 2007.
Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, limns this portrait of two Afghanistan women that is both tragic and uplifting. Enemies at first, because they are married to the same abusive man, Mariam and Laila slowly realize their only way through life is to join together as friends. Both women are abused, one as a child, and both after their marriages. All this occurs over decades through the Soviet occupation and then the Taliban. The story ends just as the Americans enter the scene. Surprises? The landscape. One is tempted to think that the entire country of Afghanistan is as dusty and dry as the movies and news videos that emerge, but Hosseini makes clear to readers that there are wet cycles, that there exist beautiful, mountainous vistas, as well. Another surprise: how misogynistic and cruel some Afghani men are, the women’s husband being a prime example. As the women toil to raise their children (a childless Mariam becomes a grandmother figure), they form a family structure of their own. After both suffering great losses, the story does end on a truly bright note: “But mostly, Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns” (366). Hosseini possesses a strong understanding of the human condition. NEXT FRIDAY: John Sedgwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West
FRIDAY: My Book World | John Sedwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West
FRIDAY: My Book World | John Sedgwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West
My Book World Cummins, Jeanine. American Dirt. New York: Flatiron, 2020.
This novel, an Oprah Book Club winner, has a lot going for it. One, the novel takes readers to a dangerous place (actually many dangerous places) without having to leave their comfortable seats rooted on American soil. Next, it is well plotted. So much of fiction depends on believable coincidence, and sometimes writers stretch that credulity. But from the very beginning, Cummins lays out the plot perfectly, to the point that you say to yourself, Well, that could happen. Third, the author’s character development is superb. One feels what it would be like to have sixteen members of your family assassinated by a notorious drug cartel, grab your young son, and head out of Mexico to el Norte, seeking American dirt for sanctuary. There are many bad players in this novel, but the miraculous thing is (and so true in life, as well) there are many good characters who help this woman and son to piece together a new life after tragedy. The novel is well worth the time, well worth the tears you will shed. If only our tears could translate into help for these poor migrants who flee their countries for a better life. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Cara Robertson's The Trial of Lizzie Borden: A True Story
My Book World Wolitzer, Hilma. Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories. With a foreword by Elizabeth Strout. New York, Bloomsbury, 2021.
These thirteen delightful stories date from 1966 to 2020, from mid-sixties angst over the “woman’s place” to the best story I’ve yet read about the early days of the Covid pandemic. And yet, in terms of tone (humorous and sardonic) and theme (woman on the verge, but not, because the narrator must keep herself together), the stories all feel as if they could have been written at the same time—so unified is the writing. Wolitzer’s stories are a prose analogue to the perfect poem: they are compressed, metaphors are subtle, and each one brings pleasure that lasts. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Oprah Winfrey's What Happened to You?
My Book World Towles, Amor. The Lincoln Highway: a Novel. New York: Viking, 2021.
This charming novel tells of the ten-day adventure of two brothers who head out from Kansas to California to build a new life, following the death of their father and one brother’s release from jail. Yet their plans are thwarted when two fellow inmates hide in the trunk of the warden’s car (and hop out when the warden isn’t looking). Well, from there the adventure heads east instead of west. Perhaps the most captivating character is Billy, the eight-year-old brother who is smarter than any other character in the book but also the most disarming. It is his idea to travel coast to coast from New York to California on the “historical” Lincoln Highway. And without revealing any spoilers, the two brothers do eventually get to do just that—even if that journey doesn’t begin until the very last sentence. The Lincoln Highway is just as fascinating, though in different ways, as Towles’s previous book, A Gentleman in Moscow. Towles is a master at several things, all adding up to great writing. One, is characterization. Even characters with the smallest parts are developed so that readers know who they are. Second is structure. Towles’s intricate scaffolding keeps readers informed of where they are at all times in the novel’s unraveling, without making it too simple. By using multiple points of view, by way of a character per chapter, he, at times, overlaps the portrayal of certain scenes, from two different points of view—providing readers an interesting “truth.” By the way, the ten parts begin with Part Ten and work toward Part One. All POVs are written in the third person with the exception of one, Duchess’s, which may make him the main narrator though not the central character. And third, Towles’s dialog—represented by way of em dashes instead of quotation marks—harks back to the fiction of an earlier period. I’m not sure why Towles does it, perhaps to do just that, make the early 1950s seem farther back than they really are. Are we to expect Lincoln Highway II? It wouldn’t trouble me at all. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hilma Wolitzer's Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories
My Book World Choi, Susan. Trust Exercise: A Novel. New York: Holt, 2019.
Boy! (or Girl!), what a ride this read is. Metafiction perhaps at its most confounding, at least for this reader. The first third of the novel seems to be a traditional high school love story gone awry, both David and Sarah soured on, yet still stuck on each other—set in a nontraditional performing arts high school. The setting is all important, as these kids are smart and are striving to become great actors—and are easily manipulated by adults they admire or wish to please. As near as I can tell, the story is set in a city like Houston (imagine primeval swamp with skyscrapers), though the name is never spelled out. Next third of the book changes to the voice of another young woman at that high school, Karen, a superficial friend to Sarah. The author does an odd thing whereby Karen sometimes speaks in first person, and sometimes talks about herself in the third person. Must be a good reason for this. Perhaps Choi is portraying the fracturing of this (by now) woman’s personality. In the third part, readers begin to realize something is off. The story strand they’ve been holding onto is no longer there. It turns out the first third of the book is really “fiction” that “Karen” has written about some real people whom readers now get to become acquainted with in the last third. To say more would create a spoiler, and I’m not going there. While there is much to admire about this award-winning book—its structure and its strong characterizations—it left me wondering if Choi was intent on entertaining herself or her readers. You be the judge. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Jenna Fischer's The Actor’s Life: A Survival Guide
My Book WorldMcCarter, Margaret Hill. A Master’s Degree. With illustrations in color by W. D. Goldbeck. Chicago: McClurg, 1913.
I read this book for two reasons. One, the novel is set in a place modeled after my alma mater, Southwestern College, in Winfield, Kansas. And two, I happened to have a copy I inherited from my grandmother, inscribed with her name and the date, “1915.” Some familiar spots on the landscape do appear in the book: the large “S” of sizable stones that must be whitewashed each year, the Walnut River Valley, Sunrise College substituting for my SC, the actual sunset hill of one hundred feet above ground. Otherwise, the novel is an overly sentimental rendering of one young man’s four years in college. The book is marred by the details McCarter leaves out: how many steps down Sunset hill to the bottom (77), how classes were conducted, where and how students lived, the topography to a greater degree (she does great watercolor washes describing spectacular sunsets). I did, however, get a feel for a certain type of student that both schools, fictional and real, seem to attract: a rough cut outlier, bright enough but unpolished, who arrives at commencement a much-changed person. One who will continue to grow and change throughout life. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Suson Choi's Trust Exercise
My Book World Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Duggan, 2018.
A scholarly and erudite book, The Road to Unfreedom is a plea for Western peoples to wake up and smell the borscht burning on the stove. Snyder begins with two phrases: politics of inevitability, “a sense that the future is just more of the present,” and that nothing can be done (7); the other phrase, politics of eternity “places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood” (8). As Snyder develops his thesis that both Europe and American could be on the way to unfreedom, he repeatedly weaves into the fabric of his text these two terms. Russia has already traveled down this road, accepted its role as victim, that the world is always out to get Russia. If Europe and America do not pay attention to the signs of fascism or authoritarianism present in their own countries, they, too, could wind up like Russia. For the general reader, this book can be tough reading, but I invite anyone wanting to know what might be wrong with our country to take a look at it. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall: A Novel. Book One of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy
My Book World Shute, Nevil. On the Beach. New York: Morrow, 1957.
This novel, which could have worked as a cautionary tale in its publication year, 1957, can still bring shivers to one’s spine. In this narrative, the worst has already happened, a vague war begun, on accident, between Russia and China, in which nuclear warfare destroys most of the northern hemisphere. Only the Australians and other South Pacific cultures survive . . . for a while. As we know, such high amounts of radiation kill immediately and keep on killing over weeks and months as its fine particles continue to float to earth. The main characters realize intellectually what will happen but continue to live as if death won’t come, racing in a local grand prix, planting a garden one won’t benefit from, collecting presents for one’s children when one “returns” to his family in America. Shute is deft in creating what looks like denial and yet is a way for characters to cope, until the very end. At that time, little red pills of barbiturates have been distributed like penny candy, and we see each one take his or her dosage and end their lives peacefully. We are made to consider, however, what will happen to the earth itself. After a number of years, so Shute believes, the radiation will clear, the earth will be ready for inhabitation again. It shall repopulate itself with some kind of creatures. The novel has one final lesson for those living today. Nuclear war is the ultimate global warming, the ultimate in climate change. Forever. The thought should still give us pause. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD
MY BOOK WORLD Brandon, Will. The Wolf Hunt: A Tale of the Texas Badlands. A Derrick Miles Mystery. No City: Gale, 2021.
Full disclosure moment: I am part of the Lubbock, Texas, Ad Hoc writing group of which the author speaks in book’s Acknowledgements page. I mention this fact, not to tout my involvement in the enterprise but to give some context. The author brought bits and pieces of this work in its infancy to our group. Some of it, like all our writing, was rough, a work-in-progress, but always what was generated created great interest on the part of all members. We can’t wait to read more was a common comment. What Brandon has realized here goes far beyond, in my opinion, what might have transpired in less capable hands. This book succeeds in being so many things: a pastiche of the highest order, writing “in the style” of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles; a bit of a cozy mystery; and a great bit historical novel. Setting the novel in nineteenth-century Texas but always with an eye to England, where its murder victim hails from, the author creates an admixture of American and British English diction born of a particular period. Historical details give great interest and credit to the work, in which, for example, the narrator, Doctor Hooper, uses one of the first Kodak cameras to great effect. The author’s details on how the camera works not only read with authenticity but are crucial to his helping his partner, Derrick Miles, to solve the mystery. No point in recreating the plot, if one is acquainted with Doyle’s book. Readers will find its points familiar, yet with their own twists here and there. If you’re a mystery junky, or if you just like well-crafted fiction, I trust you will enjoy Will Brandon’s The Wolf Hunt. Get a copy! NEXT BLOG: November 9, 2021
My Book World Hazzard, Shirley. The Great Fire. New York: Farrar, 2003.
This novel takes place all over the globe, it seems, in the period following World War II. When one first encounters the word “fire,” one believes that the book may be about a single fire. The next false signal is near the end of Part One in which, in a flashback to 1942, one witnesses a plane crash: “There was an explosion after the crash, then a great fire that, despite the rains, smouldered on overnight. The villagers struggled up in the wet, but explosions kept them off” (52). Mere foreshadowing. The main character, Aldred Leith, recalls, as a youth, visiting a monument to WWI in London, one of over 300 steps: “The monument to the Great Fire” (91). Leith, in his thirties, falls in love with a girl of seventeen and eventually marries her, but even that relationship of love cannot save him from the author’s great fire, the war through which he has just lived: “Even to her, he would not say outright that he was thinking of death: of the many who had died in their youth, under his eyes; of those he had killed, of whom he’d known nothing. On the red battlefield, where I’ll never go again; in the inextinguishable conflagration” (278). Any war is comprised of fire, from fireball to friendly fire, but Hazzard transforms war from an abstraction into one single, eternal event, as she says, a conflagration. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD
My Book World Amburn, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.
I got what I deserved for reading this book: perpetual arousal. My God, maybe one of the most sex-laden books of literary biography I’ve ever read: all about one man and his friends and lovers. According to Amburn, Kerouac keeps a sex list of not only his partners but how many times they engage. It amounts to a sexual track meet of stupendous proportions (if self-reporting is accurate): sex with men, sex with women. Maybe the man had a third testicle? Enough of that. Because Amburn turns out to be Kerouac’s final editor, a young man attempting to make his mark in publishing, he stands to have one of the most tolerant and understanding viewpoints of the controversial author of On the Road and at least a dozen other novels. Like a number of important American authors before him, Kerouac is ahead of his time, ahead of what critics are capable of understanding. Like many writers, he must scramble for money nearly his entire life, never experiencing the adulation that is to come after his premature death, when he dies at forty-seven of alcoholism. But if anything, he remains a hero of young writers of all ages, writers who are willing to put everything on the line, to write novels the way they want to, not kowtowing to editors, publishers, or even the public. For that, yes, he is a true hero. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire
My Book World García, Rodrigo. A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez. New York: HarperVia, 2021.
The son of Gabriel García Márquez writes a brief but compelling remembrance of his famous father and formidable mother. Each of the five parts begins with a brief epigraph from one of Márquez’s works. North American culture has so much to learn from our friends in South America whose profound sense of family—in spite of its many complexities—outshines our own. I found myself envying the relationship that Rodrigo has with his parents, his brother, his own children and his nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, grandparents long gone but whose influence seems eternal—no wonder Márquez could write a book as profound as One Hundred Years of Solitude. He needed only comb his own ancestry for his complete cast of characters. I envision myself reading this book again and again. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Amburn Ellis's Subterranean Kerouac.
My Book World Arenas, Reinaldo. The Doorman. Translated by Dolores M. Koch. New York: Grove, 1991 (1987).
The more I read of Arenas’s work the more I am charmed by a skilled writer’s use of magical realism. In this instance, Juan, a young Cuban immigrant is hired as doorman by a fairly exclusive residential hotel in New York City. He does his very best to learn the names of all the occupants and their quirks and preferences. He fetches and messages for them. He does his best to learn the names of all their pets as well, a veritable Noah’s Ark from the tiniest to the largest. This odd point is where one begins to sense the leap readers are to make, from reality to magic. The animals begin to speak to Juan in “human language,” and at first that seems fine with Juan. But then the situation evolves into something more complicated (no spoilers). Juan is on a spiritual journey to locate a “door” that will lead him and everyone who wants into a better world. Arenas is skilled in dragging along even the most skeptical of us because he has a larger point to make. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Rodrigo García's A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez
FRIDAY: My Book World | Carol Leonnig's Zero Fail
My Book World Brottman, Mikita. Couple Found Slain: After a Family Murder. New York: Holt, 2021.
This true crime book prides itself in presenting a story that is different from others about murder within a family, and I do believe it is an interesting approach. Brottman offers only a few chapters about the dysfunctional family of a young man who murders his parents and the circumstances that may lead him to do such a thing. The rest of the book concerns itself with the young man’s incarceration in the state of Maryland’s mental health and legal systems. Young Brian Bechtold, once he realizes the severity of what he has done, turns himself in to the police. He expects he will go to prison, because, of course, he has committed murder. Instead, to this day, over fifty years of age, Brian remains a resident of Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center. His story is one of abuse by psychiatrists, other patients, and a legal system that does not give healthy support to people with mental problems. If only he were in prison, he would have far more freedom, including the freedom to rehabilitate, serve his time, and get out. But at Perkins he has become a lifer, and oddly, he may be saner than one or two of the professionals who “treat” him. Brottman’s prose is unrelentingly dead, a just-the-facts-ma’am kind of journalism, but perhaps that is what true fans of true crime expect. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Reinaldo Arenas's The Doorman
My Book World Capote, Truman. The Complete Stories of Truman Capote. With an introduction by Reynolds Price. New York: Random, 2004.
Sad to say that Capote published only twenty stories (as this edition seems to indicate) in his lifetime. The “weakest” stories, if there are any, seem to be his early ones when he is barely twenty and the two written during the last decade of his life. The ones in the middle are for the most part knock-outs. Especially, I’m a sucker for his “orphan” stories: “A Christmas Memory,” “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” and “One Christmas.” In all three he develops the character Sook, an old woman, “a cousin,” who cares for the boy narrating the stories. Apparently based on one of the relatives Capote lived with as a child when his parents abandoned him for a time, Sook can tear your heart out with her generosity and illiterate wisdom. NEXT FRI: My Book World | Catherine Raven's Fox and I |
AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
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