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Irving's Last Book?

5/12/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
I was much distressed by next door people who had twin babies and played the violin; but one of the twins died, and the other has eaten the fiddle, so all is peace.
​Edward Lear, English Poet Known for His Limericks
Author of "There Was an Old Lady Whose Folly"
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​Born May 12, 1812
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E. Lear

My Book World

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Irving, John. The Last Chairlift: A Novel. New York: Simon, 2022.

I’m a big fan of most of Irving’s early and mid-career books, including his nonfiction. I loved reading Garp, Hotel New Hampshire, and A Prayer for Owen Meany. I had to begin the latter three times until it finally ensnared me and I couldn’t put it down. Perusing The Last Chairlift, sadly, is not like that.
 
I read this book aloud to my partner evenings over a period of three months. I kept waiting for Irving’s Dickensian afterburner to kick in at about page 100, that thrust that would propel us to the end. It did not engage, not for me anyway. Almost nine hundred pages seems too long for a contemporary novel, I believe. It might have been better served to come in at four or even five hundred pages. Why?
 
For one thing, there is too much of a certain kind of repetition. Normally, I like some recapitulation, little wrap-ups of or references to earlier events to remind readers what has come before. However, in this novel, Irving has an annoying habit of attaching endearing monikers like the little snowshoer to characters instead of using the character’s name (and his practice seems clunky compared to the Russians who do this rather well). Of course, he alternates their usage with their real name at times, but by the time he does, one forgets who the little snowshoer is . . . or was.
 
And did someone say ghosts? A few of the characters die along the way (the novel does cover quite a life span), but do they? They keep reappearing as ghosts, but Irving doesn’t have much of a mechanism for readers to grab onto. We’re just supposed to know it. Rather than being led to believe this is some kind of flashback, it is really encounters with ghosts we’re having. I will accept responsibility for sloppy reading, but I’m not sure it’s all my fault. Or are ghosts merely an easy, perhaps sloppy, representation of how the main character misses the people in his life who die?
 
Finally, Irving has a careerlong fascination with a number of images or motifs: bears or people in bear costumes, an almost homoerotic fascination with wrestling, and also, among others, a perhaps erotic fascination with trans people (and a son who accepts his trans mother, see The World According to Garp). This novel is populated with trans people, yet I never get the sense that Irving has a real feel or understanding of them. There is not enough information present on the page for readers to believe he knows what he’s talking about: complex physical and psychological transformations, surgical or other medical procedures, the emotional angst that must come with such metamorphoses. And always, I wonder why he avoids other LGBTIQA+ iterations, mostly the G one (except for a lesbian couple who must be the last vestige of vaudeville, appearing nightly in Two Dykes, One Who Talks, har har har). Just saying.
 
It seems that Irving may have wished for this book to be his swan song, and he puts his entire heart and snippets of every motif from his entire oeuvre and mixes them all into a fine pea soup with not a little ham. I don’t know about others, but as I finished this go-around with the latest Irving novel, I could only stomach so much of this rich pea soup. And only so much ham.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Jean Hanff Korelitz

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Robert Surtees
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Diane Duane
FRI: My Book World | Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry: Poems

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Less, More Lost Than Ever

5/5/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
On an exhausted field, only weeds grow.
​Henryk Sienkiewicz
Author of ​Quo Vadis
​Born May 5, 1846
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H. Sienkiewicz

My Book World

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Greer, Andrew Sean. Less Is Lost. New York: Little, 2022.

My only criticism of Greer’s first novel in this series, Less, was that readers had to play a guessing game as to whom the narrator was. I felt there were some problems with that mechanism (see my complete profile). Why not just write the narrative in third person? I asked at the time. Less’s lover, Freddy Pelu, could not possible know some of the things Less had experienced. At least, that is what I reasoned.
 
In this novel, Freddy Pelu is an openly open gay narrator, Less’s partner (the one he finally winds up with in the first novel). And yet, his similar narration of this novel sets up different but similarly disturbing questions: 1) Since the two men are once again separated, we don’t see them together. Less is on an extended book tour, trying to scare up extra money, Freddy off somewhere else. 2) Again, Freddy seems to be narrating Less’s story about the death of Less’s previous lover. Is he actually there to witness all of Less’s torments? 3) Why even have a partner if Less is not even going to engage with him, the least of which would be coitus?
 
Still, as a summer beach read, Greer’s mixture of apt literary allusions and familiarity with pop culture, the novel is not disappointing. It kept me reading right to the very end when Less, after crisscrossing the USA—combining literary lectures with personal journey—finally meets up with Freddy (although it is only a good guess on the part of readers). If Greer squeaks out a sequel, I do hope that, even if Freddy narrates this one, too, that readers will experience the partners being in the same room!

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Sophie Scholl

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Ariel Durant
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Benjamin Dreyer
FRI: My Book World | John Irving, The Last Chairlift


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Desperation Creates 'Character'

4/21/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.
​Nell Freudenberger
Author of ​Lucky Girls
​Born April 21, 1975
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N. Freudenberger

My Book World

Fox, Paula. Desperate Characters. With an introduction by Jonathan Franzen. New York: Norton, 1999 (1970).

This story is indeed one of desperation. Set in the late 1960s amid a crumbling New York City (Brooklyn), the middle-aged characters are desperate in different respects. Sophie, married to Otto, an attorney, feeds a feral cat that bites her. Otto’s longtime law partner, Charlie, leaves their firm, but he also becomes involved with Sophie unbeknownst to husband Otto. Sophie postpones having her bite checked to see if she might be the victim of rabies. After she and Otto finally trap the cat to have it examined, she and Otto travel to their country place to find that it has been ransacked and vandalized. Perhaps only a bottle of booze has been stolen, but many items, including books, are completely unusable due to the destruction. They consult with the man whom they pay to care for their property in the off season, not getting much satisfaction when he claims he and his son just checked it a few days before.

Much about this book is unsettling. People with a comfortable life are no longer comfortable with each other or their lives, yet they are loath to abandon them or do anything to change them. The cat bite seems to stand in for the unseen sore that is festering beneath the surface of their marriage. Unless I’ve missed something, we never learn the result of Sophie’s test, whether she’ll have to undergo the twelve rabies shots given to the stomach, one per day for nearly two weeks. Much in the way that we never learn what happens to these desperate people. The way the author must want it. The way many of our lives end up, with more questions posed than answered.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Edward R. Murrow

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Anita Loos
THURS: A Writer's Wit | C. Day Lewis
FRI: My Book World | Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It
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'Mysterious' Childhood

4/14/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.
​​Arnold Toynbee
Author of ​Mankind and Mother Earth
​Born April 14, 1889
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A. Toynbee

My Book World

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Heim, Scott. Mysterious Skin: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

Among the best novels I’ve ever read concerning adult male-to-young male molestation. Heim explores the issue inside out, from all angles. The adult, like a hawk (thus, the gay slang, chickenhawk), knows its target’s weaknesses and exploits them: the child’s loneliness, his lack of parental guidance, his need for what seems to be love (though it’s only the predator’s skewed view of love), the child’s own possible homosexuality one day. But another side of it is the fact that the child may perceive he loves this man, as well, in the case of the novel, a baseball coach. One of the coach’s victims is positive the man loves him, all the favors he bestows upon him, other gifts, the apparent affection, even the $5 bill he tosses at his favored victims, already setting them up to become whores. From the beginning, the protagonist is sure he’s been abducted by aliens, and, in a sense he has. The experience of molestation must feel like an abduction—the child’s brain scrambling to make sense of this baffling situation—makes aliens from outer space seem a lot less threatening than dealing with aliens that seem to arise out of the very ground here on earth. 

​Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Susan Faludi

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Richard Hughes
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Aubrey de Grey
FRI: My Book World | Paula Fox: Desperate Characters

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A Writer's Wit: Eudora Welty

4/13/2023

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Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever rally lost. 
​Eudora Welty
Author of 
One Writer’s Beginnings 
Born April 13, 1909
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E. Welty
Coming Next:
FRI: My Book World | Scott Heim: 
Mysterious Skin
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Susan Faludi
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Richard Hughes
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Aubrey de Grey
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Plotting Marriage

4/7/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
       The wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind.
​William Wordsworth
Author of ​The Prelude
​Born April 7, 1770
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W. Wordsworth

My Book World

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Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Marriage Plot. New York: Farrar, 2011.

I loved the author’s book, Middlesex, but this novel seems to lack movement. I saw little growth in the three main characters: Madeline, Mitchell, and Leonard. At the end, in this love triangle, Madeline is still no closer to deciding what she wants in life. Perhaps that is all right; she is just out of college, just like the other two. The young man who falls in love with her, Mitchell, is a fellow college student and her best friend since childhood, but when she rejects him to marry Leonard, another student, he takes a protracted world trip with his best male friend. And when Mitchell returns, he finds Madeleine in a mess because she has married Leonard (against Mitchell’s advice) who is diagnosed bipolar, and he has freed Madeleine to divorce him after his major meltdown. Mitchell then lives with Madeleine and her family (they love him) while she recovers. The two even have sex, a meh experience for both of them. The marriage plot, alluding to the title, turns out to be a reference to an academic essay Madeleine has written, finally published by an obscure journal within the last pages of this novel. Leonard has gone to live in the Oregonian woods with a buddy. Hm. Even if “sad,” it seems the novel could have a more satisfying end. Just me, I guess.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Margaret of Valois-
Angoulême
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Aleksandr Ostrovsky
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Eudora Welty 
FRI: My Book World | Scott Heim, Mysterious Skin

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Lahiri: Among the Best

3/3/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
I was raised in Catholic school where we were given a lot of heavy literature and a dense, weighty lyric wasn't strange to me.
​​Jennifer Warnes,  Songwriter
Author of "Right Time of the Night"
Born March 3, 1947
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J. Warnes

My Book World

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. New York: Knopf, 2008.

These are eight long stories that are reminiscent of Alice Munro’s long stories in that Lahiri seems to tell an entire lifetime in one. She neither leaves much out, nor does she include too much. Each word, each sentence, fits into each paragraph, each section, to make a complete and satisfying story. Her characters have depth, sometimes taking readers in surprising directions—in the same way that actual human beings can surprise us in our own lives. I tried to read each story in one sitting because quitting before it is done is like leaving a banquet after one or two courses. I admire her work for its craft and its deeply conveyed emotions.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Moon

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Jeffrey Eugenides
THURS: A Writer's Wit |Vita Sackville-West
FRI: My Book World | Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On

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Basement Living

2/24/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.
​​Jane Hirshfield
Author of ​Nine Gates
​Born February 24, 1953
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My Book World

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​Mosley, Walter. The Man in My Basement: A Novel. New York: Little, 2004.
 
A short but expansive novel with this premise: An odd little White man seeks out a Black man, Charles Blakey, because he has a large basement that is also windowless and contains only one door. Anniston Bennet’s proposition is this: that Charles will lock Anniston up in his basement for a certain amount of time. In return Charles will receive a large sum of money. Charles says no at first, but he reconsiders. Charles has inherited his two-hundred-year-old home, but it is his only asset. He’s never worked hard or steadily, in fact, has been fired from a bank for embezzling a small sum of money—thus being blackballed by the rest of the town. So Charles does agree to house the little man in his basement, basically serving as Bennet’s master. What follows is a much deeper story than what may think in the beginning. To say more would indeed spoil the read about how these two men come to terms with their pasts.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Tessa Hadley

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Robert Lowell
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Matt Taibbi
FRI: My Book World | Jhumpa Lahiri's ​Unaccustomed Earth

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'woman in White' Is Illusive

2/17/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
​Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
​Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Author of The Deepening Stream
​Born February 17,  1879
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D. Canfield Fisher

My Book World

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Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Introduction and Notes by Camille Cauti. New York: Barnes, 2005 (1861).

A gem of the nineteenth century, this Victorian novel is intricately plotted down to the last page. (Consult the Internet for the summary.) I’m glad I read it, and it is yet another I can mark off my Jane Smiley list of top one hundred novels (see her Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel). But I must say that even for someone who has much time on my hands, I couldn’t appreciate Collins’s glacial pace in developing complexity. I think we denizens of the 20th and 21st centuries have been corrupted in our ability to stay with something twice as long as many contemporary novels (clocks in at 635 pages). I shall keep trying, though. I shall keep trying.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit |
Anaïs Nin
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Christopher Bram
THURS: A Writer's Wit | W. W. B. Du Bois
FRI: My Book World | Walter Mosley's The Man in My Basement

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Swim | Pond | Rain

2/3/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
The greatest mistake is the trying to be more agreeable than you can be.
​Walter Bagehot
Author of ​The English Constitution
​Born February 3, 1826
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W. Bagehot

My Book World

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Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. New York: Random, 2021.
 
Saunders, if this book is any representation, is a talented teacher of writing. His brilliance as a writer always intimidates me a bit; I’m not sure I understand his own fiction all that well. However, here, as he examines seven stories of Russian writers Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, Saunders makes very clear through illustration and fine contemplation what it means to construct a solid story. And I use that word deliberately because for Saunders writing a short story is about constructing a work of art.
 
I can’t reveal everything he covers, but I can mention several concepts that struck me as being essential. If the reader is a novice writer, you can learn much (bring your pencil). If you’ve written lots of stories, perhaps Saunders’s ideas will be a refresher course for you or bring to light elements you’ve not considered before now.
 
One, Saunders is concerned with cause and effect. Each action in a story should be the result of some other action. Why is this character doing this or that? Second, Saunders contends that escalation is paramount—what may cause one to keep reading is that the stakes go up. Each major event should, in a cause-and-effect manner, escalate the story, fire it up, move it along. Third, he makes a simple list of major events for each story, demonstrating to himself how each may lead to the next. Of course, his ideas are not all about plotting; he’s ultimately concerned with the characters and why they act the way they do so that readers may get to the human heart of the story. A must-read for fiction writers.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Peter Carey

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Bishop
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Brendan Behan
FRI: My Book World | 
Willa Cather's The Professor’s House

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Mother and Daughter: Oil and Water

1/6/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.
​Elizabeth Strout
Author of Amy and Isabelle
​Born January 6, 1956
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E. Strout

My Book World

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Strout, Elizabeth. Amy and Isabelle. New York: Vintage, 1998.

I regret that this, Strout’s first book, is my most recent one read, after having perused five other Strout books previously. The novel is indeed a tour de force, worthy of premiering a writing career. In it Strout tells the story of titular characters Amy and Isabelle, daughter and mother respectively. It is one of the hottest summers on record in Shirley Falls, a New England town in the 1970s. The site’s yellowing river exudes a strong Sulphur smell. No one has air conditioning, and everyone is hot all the time, in every dwelling whether it is at home or at work. Years before Isabelle has come to Shirley Falls with a baby in her arms. Her husband has died, she tells everyone. Now Amy is seventeen, and her mother is youngish, in her thirties.

Readers in essence become acquainted with the entire town. All of Isabelle’s co-workers in an office where she is the boss’s secretary: Fat Bev and a number of other notable characters. There are Amy’s school friends, particularly Stacy, who is pregnant, and, being the daughter of two mental health workers, is allowed to have her baby and give it up for adoption. The two friends share lunch each day sitting in the nearby woods and smoking a single cigarette each (Stacy hides them in a Tampon carrier kept in her school bag). They are close, yet there are secrets about themselves they never reveal to the other, things that might make one dislike the other (each fears). There is Amy’s middle-aged math teacher, a bearded man, not particularly handsome, but charismatic enough to lure Amy into an illicit relationship. There is the disappearance of a girl about the girls’ age from another town, a story that sends shivers up and down the backs of everyone in Shirley Falls. All of these people have ordinary but messy lives, even though the town is beset with an active church life divided among a number of denominations. Even so, an undercurrent of unease, perhaps some might say evil, brings all these souls together in a manner that keeps one reading as fast as one can.

But one should not read too fast, because by doing so one can buzz by the small and delicious details that Strout plants along the way. Pregnant teenage girl. Middle-age man lovingly seducing his pupil. An ambitious mother with a dark past of her own. Oh, and several adulterous affairs. How could it be a boring narrative? And yet, the novel is not a potboiler in the traditional sense. There is no cathartic ending in which all the bad people get their comeuppance. No real heroes—except in the way that true friends can be heroic to each other. The story ends as satisfyingly quiet as it begins. Yes, after a long, hot summer, where the inhabitants of Shirley Falls are frying in the hell of their lives, the sky opens up and the heavens pour forth rain, providing at last a natural relief. Finally, the characters of Shirley Falls may breathe again. Until the next wave of heat develops.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Pat Benatar
 
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Also Leopold
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Jack London
FRI: My Book World | Bloom & Atkinson's ​Evidence of Love

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Some 'Customs' Change

12/9/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
There is nothing quixotic or romantic in wanting to change the world. It is possible. It is the age-old vocation of all humanity.
​Gioconda Belli
​Author of 
Born December 9,1948
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G. Belli

My Book World

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​Wharton, Edith. The Custom of the Country. With an introduction by Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: Scribner, 1997 (1913).

Wharton, portrayer of early twentieth-century America, unveils the life of one Undine Spragg who, in time, will marry three men, one of them twice. From the time Undine is a young woman, she is hard to please. She never has quite the clothes she wants, never quite associates with the people she really wishes to. And when someone, like her parents, stretch themselves to make her happy, she is far from grateful. She is like this with each of her husbands, too, the first one an apparent rube from her small New York City suburb. Then, she marries up, a handsome man who might become a poet, but because she doesn’t wish to live on his small trust and make do, he must go to work. Jumping to France, she marries royalty, but even he doesn’t have enough money, and she leaves him, as well. Finally, she marries the rube again (he just happens to be in France), because since the early days he has become a billionaire. And he gives her nearly everything she can dream of, including a fine home to a little son (by husband two) she his ignored since his birth nine years earlier. She attempts to goad this man into becoming an ambassador (on the book’s last page), but when he tells her that she could never become an ambassador’s wife because she is divorced, she is furious. Wharton ends the novel this way:

[Undine] had learned that there was something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for her. She could never be an Ambassador’s wife: and as she advanced to welcome her first guests she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for” (509).
​Wharton’s novel, some say, is prescient for its time, predicting what American society might become like. And along with Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)—whose novels are published at roughly the same time (within a decade)—she limns what can happen to ambitious women who have no place in society except to be some man’s wife.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Kenneth Patchen
 
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Shirley Jackson
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Muriel Rukeyser
FRI: My Book World | Bloom & Atkinson's ​Evidence of Love
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Oh, Strout Wins with 'William'

11/18/2022

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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
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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 
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'The Dutch House" a Big Novel

10/7/2022

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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
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M. Alexander

My Book World

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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

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Egan's 'Candy House' Is Sweet

9/30/2022

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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
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J. Asher

My Book World

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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

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Ms. Brodie Still Sharp As a Tack

8/19/2022

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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
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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
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Young Mungo: A Child Is Abused

8/12/2022

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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
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M. R. Rinehart

My Book World

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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

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The Tedium of Suffering

8/5/2022

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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
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G. de Maupassant
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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

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A Writer's Wit: Steven Millhauser

8/3/2022

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So imagine a fire going—wood snapping the way it does when it’s a little green—the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains—and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys—and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning. And so you dare to be happy. You do that thing. You dare.
​Steven Millhauser
Author of ​Voices in the Night: Stories
​Born August 3, 1943
Coming Next:
THURS: AWW | Helen Thomas
FRIDAY: My Book World | Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest
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S. Millhauser
0 Comments

Amy Tan: Author of Opposites

7/29/2022

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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
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S. Blackmore

My Book World

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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


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'Weird Pig' Talks

7/8/2022

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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
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A. Waugh

My Book World

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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

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England: Island of Last Hopes

7/1/2022

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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
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G. Sand

My Book World

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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

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'Swing Time' Swings on a Star

6/17/2022

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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
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C. Anderson

My Book World

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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

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Whitman Adored, Examined

6/10/2022

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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
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S. Bellow

My Book World

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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

0 Comments

Novel Provides Glimpse of the Old West

6/3/2022

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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
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S. Constantin

My Book World

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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.

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