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MY BOOK WORLD![]() Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2002. Author Sebold adopts an odd and unconventional point of view by narrating the book by way of a murdered fourteen-year-old girl. The most astounding aspect of the author’s bold move is that she so totally buys into this POV that it seems quite believable to readers. Young Susie Salmon is on her way home (swimming upstream? obvious catch?) from school when she is enticed by an across-the-street neighbor, Mr. Harvey, to visit his “den” in the middle of a cornfield. The rather intelligent girl knows better, but, as I said, she is ensnared by a master seducer. Mr. Harvey has murdered multiple females, mostly young girls like Susie, usually after he has violated them sexually. How he has gotten away with it for so long is probably a tribute to his wiliness: his obsequious way with other adults, his “shy” act in front of children, girls specifically. Susie’s father right away suspects Mr. Harvey, but he has no proof, and, after a few weeks Mt. Harvey disappears from the neighborhood. Yet, because of Susie’s omniscient view of things (anyone going to heaven has this POV), she knows exactly where everyone in her life is at any given time and what they are thinking. Nice device. No other writer will ever be able to use it again! In an ordinary novel, the comeuppance of the murderer might be paramount in the minds of most readers. What happens to the dastardly Mr. Harvey? I’ll tell you. In a very short scene near the end, readers witness Mr. Harvey attempting to pick up a young woman as they both smoke cigarettes out back of a store. She stalks away, calling him a creep, and surely as an act of God, an icicle drops from the eave of the building and does away with Mr. Harvey. It is all he deserves by way of attention in this novel. Someone else will have to tell his story, if anyone would want to. More miraculous is the ending in which, by way of a bit of magical realism, Susie has one more meeting with a boy she had kissed just before she died. Of course, now, he is twenty-one, which makes things different, but Sebold handles this problem very deftly. In all, a very satisfying novel that investigates a number of issues in modern life besides the perennial problem of creeps picking up and murdering children. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Betty Friedan WEDS: A Writer's Wit | William S. Burroughs THURS: A Writer's Wit | Annie Bethel Spencer FRI: My Book World | Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon MY BOOK WORLD![]() King, Dave. The Ha-Ha: A Novel. New York: Back Bay, 2005. Nothing like holding a book on your shelves for twenty years before reading it! But it has been worth the wait. A young Howard Kapostash serves sixteen days in Vietnam before he is severely injured—so injured that even with therapy he cannot speak or write any longer. Think about it, a fairly good looking young man is so injured he emerges looking like Quasimodo—even into his forties. Though he does carry a card informing strangers he is of normal intelligence, his life is full of difficulties. Oh, he does all right with the people he deals with every day: the nuns at the convent where he keeps the grounds mowed and neat, the woman living with him who tends his books and in return is allowed to use his kitchen to maintain her soup business. Sylvia, a former girlfriend from high school, who now asks (demands) a big favor of him. Sylvia is checking herself into a drug rehab place, and she needs a place to leave her nine-year-old son. Pronto. Yes, for an undetermined amount of time, little Ryan will come to live with Howard and the rest of his housemates: Nit and Nat, two hippie types who manage to pay their rent, but barely. Howie and Ryan develop an interesting relationship. Through his usual pantomime, Howard is able to communicate with Ryan and even teaches him a few things about baseball and life. After eight weeks, the two become close, Howard being like a father Ryan has never had in his life, and because Ryan has taught Howard a few things, as well. This becomes the time when Sylvia is well enough to leave rehab. Instead of this reunion of mother and son being a happy time, however, Sylvia sets up a cause-and-effect situation by which Howard is victimized once again. I won’t spoil the ending because it is well worth reading for yourself to find out what it is. No wonder the novel was bestseller in its time! Yes, about the title. At first I thought this book must be about a stand-up comic. But a ha-ha is “a recessed landscape design element that creates a vertical barrier (particularly on one side) while preserving an uninterrupted view of the landscape beyond from the other side. The name comes from viewers’ surprise when seeing the construction.” (Wikipedia). A photograph or diagram can expand this description if you can locate one. There is a ha-ha at the convent where Howard works, and it becomes a major point in the plot as well as providing a metaphor for Howard’s life. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Nien Cheng WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Anton Chekhov THURS: A Writer's Wit | Shirley Hazzard FRI: My Book World | Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones MY BOOK WORLD![]() Patchett, Ann. The Magician’s Assistant. Orlando: Harcourt, 1997. Magician Parsifal dies suddenly in Los Angeles, and his assistant wife, Sabine, is instantly burdened with a visit from Parsifal’s family of Alliance, Nebraska. The two members who fly to LA for the service are Parsifal’s mother, Dot, and the magician’s younger sister, Bertie. Sabine is in no mood, especially when they keep calling her husband Guy, a name he gave up long before for adopting his stage name, Parsifal. But Sabine suffers the visitors quietly, taking them to places familiar to Guy/Parsifal, including the rug factory he owns and runs. Oh, and readers learn early that Parsifal is gay and has acquired a lover/partner, Phan. Parsifal marries Sabine largely to protect their financial interests. Readers also learn that most magicians don’t make a living from the work; they have to have a day job, too. Sabine herself is employed by an architecture firm, creating exquisite models for structures the firm is designing. During the short visit, Sabine becomes close to Parsifal’s family members and promises to make a trip to Nebraska soon. In the middle of January Sabine lands, after a shaky flight, in Scottsbluff. She is greeted by Dot and Bertie. Later she meets Kitty, Guy’s older sister, who looks a lot like him. So do her teenage sons, one of whom is also named Guy. At first Sabine is ill at ease but after some long visits with Dot and Kitty, she learns more about her late husband, Guy/Parsifal, mainly that he had a major tussle with the law when young, and the law won. Because he was underage, he spent his time in a reformatory, not in a prison for adults. After serving his sentence, he headed for LA to begin his career as a magician. Back in his heyday, he and Sabine had appeared on the Johnny Carson Show, and someone had made a VHS tape of their appearance. In fact, the family watches it almost daily. They insist that Sabine see it, too. She’s never viewed a recording of their work before, so it is novel to her. Patchett does a masterful job of carefully threading together all the strands of this novel, and I won’t say more because there would have to be some spoilers, and I don’t want to do that, I just don’t. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | M. K. Hobson WEDS: A Writer's Wit |August Strindberg THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anya Seton FRI: My Book World | Dave King, The Ha-Ha: A Novel
MY BOOK WORLD![]() Stone, Nic. Dear Martin: A Novel. New York: Penguin Random, 2017. A Black teenage boy about to matriculate at an Ivy League school faces a number of lifechanging challenges. Not only does Justyce have deep feelings for a white Jewish girl who also likes him but he becomes involved in two escalating events with police officers in his city. During one of these incidents, he and his best friend are shot by an officer. To deal with his trials and tribulations, Justyce writes letters to the late Martin Luther King as if he is a living mentor. The author handles with depth and sensitivity all that Justyce must go through to grow as a person. I like how Stone uses “news bulletins” from local TV stations to bring readers up to date on events, as well as an interesting font to distinguish Justyce’s letters to MLK. In dialogue, Stone utilizes a playscript format, eliminating the need for quite so many “they said” situations. Not only a very moving book but a stylishly presented one, as well. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Edward St. Aubyn WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Jenny Nimmo THURS: A Writer's Wit | William Kennedy FRI: My Book World | Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant
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MY BOOK WORLD![]() Cunningham, Michael. Day: A Novel. New York: Random, 2024 (2023). The novel revolves around one day, yet the same date, in 2019, 2020, and 2021: April 5. Right away one might recognize these years as the before, during, and after of the COVID pandemic and US lockdown. But, of course, the novel is more complex and more flexible than that (the disease serving more as wallpaper than plot substance). Cunningham fluidly explores the dynamics of two couples and their families. Dan and Isabel live with their two children, Nathan and Violet, and Isabel’s younger gay brother, Robbie, age thirty. Only not for long, because Robbie is off to Iceland to live by himself in an (understandably) cold little cabin. The other family is comprised of Garth (brother to Dan) and Chess, and their son—not quite a family because Garth does not live with his wife and child (who now acknowledge that Garth is the son’s father). Both families seem to be coming apart but readers aren’t sure why (perhaps, in part, it is because of the pandemic, invisible but insidious). Cunningham explores their dynamics quietly and assuredly so that by the end readers have a good idea of what has gone on in their lives, before during and after the pandemic. The last few chapters are each mere paragraphs long, providing a soft-landing denouement. Cunningham is the best. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ruth Sepetys WEDS: A Writer's Wit | President Joe Biden THURS: A Writer's Wit | Andrew Sean Greer FRI: My Book World | Armistead Maupin, Michael Tolliver Lives ![]() Alvarez, Julia. The Cemetery of Untold Stories: A Novel. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2024. I loved the author’s novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. It was quite poignant and enlightening to learn about the culture of the Dominican Republic. In this recent work, readers deepen their knowledge of the DR. Noted author, Alma Cruz inherits a questionable piece of property in her homeland (she selects the sorriest of four plots, her three sisters fighting over the “better” properties). There she encloses the land and forms a cemetery, not for bodies, but for her manuscripts of untold stories—primarily for the characters, whom she feels are as deserving of an eternal home as humans. The characters come alive from DR history, one being dictator Trujillo’s wife, Bienvenida. But there are lesser ones whose lives are just as interesting: Pepito, Manuel, Filomena, and more. It is a book of some complexity, so I know I shall return to it again to gain full advantage of its treasures. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Naomi Wolf WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Whoopi Goldberg THURS: A Writer's Wit | Roland Martin FRI: My Book World | Michael Cunningham, Day: A Novel MY BOOK WORLD![]() Strout, Elizabeth. Olive, Again: A Novel. New York: Random, 2019. I love Elizabeth Strout’s writing. It reads so simply; the pages just fly by. But one must not mistake this ease of reading for a lack of complexity. Her characters only seem to step out of real life and onto the page with little effort. I fell in love with Olive in Olive Kitteridge: She blurts out what she thinks, no matter whom it may offend or hurt. Even so, she’s had two loving husbands, both of whom have died on her. In Olive, Again I fall in love all over again. “Olive” and I are now in the same age range. Strout writes effectively in a charming way about being old. (As I say to my friends, “I didn’t mind getting old, but I hate being old.”) As a retired school teacher from the region (Maine), Olive continually runs into (grown) people who were once her pupils. Some of them she doesn’t like and vice versa. Others she has a soft spot for. After Olive experiences a heart attack, her son arranges for her to receive home healthcare until she can manage by herself. One of the helpers is a former student who has, to Olive, an offensive bumper sticker on her car—one promoting an oranged-hair man who becomes president. Yet, in the end, she asks this woman to tell Olive her story, and once again, in her own gruff manner, she accepts this woman, political views and all. Olive’s son has been thoughtful enough to put her name on a wait list at a local facility featuring a variety of settings for seniors, so she doesn’t have long to wait when she makes the decision to move there. She abhors the idea but realizes she can no longer manage the house she shared with her second husband (besides, it was formerly his house and she’s never felt at home there). At the facility, Olive finds herself alone in most situations; she just has no patience for people who don’t think like her, and she often tells them so in one way or another. After some time, however, she does make friends with someone she names Mousy Pants. Mousy Pants turns out to be an Isabelle, who shares her life story with Olive, and they realize they have a great deal in common: adult children who care for them but live at some distance, for one. They go so far, after a health scare, to exchange door keys. On alternating nights, one stops by to wave good night and see that everything is all right. Olive is relieved to find out that she’s not the only resident using what she calls poopy pants (adult diapers). On the next to the last page, eighty-five-year-old Olive comes to this realization: She was going to die. It seemed extraordinary to her, amazing. She had never really believed it before. But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she had passed in the corridor when she was a high school girl herself (many—most—would be dead by now), the billion streaks of emotion she’d had as she’d looked at sunrises, sunsets, the different hands of waitresses who had placed before her cups of coffee— All of it gone, or about to go (288). Strout’s novels are all award winners in one way or another; it is not hard to see why. And Olive, Again is no exception! Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Debbie Macomber WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Arvavind Adiga THURS: A Writer's Wit | Gabrielle Zevin FRI: My Book World | David Sedaris, The Best of Me
MY BOOK WORLD![]() Patchett, Ann. Tom Lake: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2023. I’ve never before read a novel whose existence depended almost entirely on another work of literature for its structure, its heart—but this one would seem to win all the awards for such a category. In the author’s note Patchett says: “I thank Thornton Wilder, who wrote the play that has been an enduring comfort, guide, and inspiration throughout my life. If this novel has a goal, it is to turn the reader back to Our Town, and to all of Wilder’s work. Therein lies the joy” (311). Her love and admiration palpitate throughout, far from utilizing the play as a gimmick but giving the work its sole purpose: how one actor relates to Our Town for her entire life. In high school Lara plays the role of Emily in Wilder’s play. (I’ll assume that everyone here at one time has read, read for, played a part in, or witnessed a production and is familiar with all its characters.) Thus begins Lara’s career as an actor. Yet her career is not a typical one. Yes, she acquires an agent who gets her into Hollywood. She even auditions for some plays on Broadway. But in a summer stock production (staged at Tom Lake) in Traverse City, Michigan, she wins the part of Emily, as well as the female lead in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, a role for which she is not suited. Peter Duke, a man not much older than Lara, plays Emily’s father onstage. He, too, is headed for stardom, but he is more serious than Lara. He keeps detailed notebooks on the characters he plays, reviewing his scribbles up to the minute before speaking his first line. Lara depends on the fact that in some sense she is Emily. She bunks with Duke and falls for the handsome, charming actor. He will marry three times and end up in rehab for alcohol addiction. Patchett weaves all of Lara’s career within the fabric of her own adult family life. She has married a man she met during that run of summer stock but not until years later. They now have three adult daughters, one of whom is named Emily. The family owns and operates a cherry orchard farm, and it takes all of them to bring in the crop each year. As they toil, the daughters beg mom, Lara, to tell them all about her time with Peter Duke, her time in film. He is by now so famous that Emily, the eldest, believes somehow that Duke could be her father (which time will tell he is not). This tightly knit novel is a joy to read aloud (which I did for my partner). When I taught tenth-grade pre-AP English, my pupils seemed to enjoy reading Wilder’s play aloud each year; thus, I studied it ten years straight years, having it engrained into my being. Patchett recalling the lines (Where’s my girl? Where’s my birthday girl?) causes them to echo throughout more than the halls of the school where I taught. They resound throughout our country’s schools. I once scoffed that the play was perfect for high schoolers, but what it is perfect for is to remind every adult that Our Town is quintessential America. It is the essence of the play’s universality. One character receives a letter addressed this way: United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the mind of God” (45). Each of us could be that addressee! Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Italo Calvino WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Joseph Bruchac THURS: A Writer's Wit | Elinor Lipman FRI: My Book World | Elizabeth Strout, Olive Again MY BOOK WORLDNewman, Paul. The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir. Based on interviews and oral histories conducted by Stewart Stern. Compiled by David Rosenthal. With a foreword by Melissa Newman and an afterword by Clea Newman Soderlund. New York: Knopf, 2022.
I'm a big fan of this sensational actor, but the book leaves a lot to be desired. The man tells you over and over again that he is separated from his own feelings, and that emotional distance is evident in his very own words. He hardly says anything about his wife, actor Joanne Woodward, and, even though he mentions going through therapy (finally), he doesn’t reveal much about the process or how it might transform his life from curmudgeon to kind philanthropist. The compilers cover only a fraction of his films. All in all, disappointing. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Jimmy Carter (100th birthday) WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Maria Ressa THURS: A Writer's Wit | Thomas Wolfe FRI: My Book World | Ann Patchett, Tom Lake ![]() Robison, Mary. Why Did I Ever: A Novel. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2001. Some books you just have to read as if you were boarding a rollercoaster. You can’t figure it out necessarily; you just get on and ride until the thing comes to an end. Told in over 530 mini-chapters (even those are divided into short paragraphs or sentences), the novel is narrated by a woman who writes/doctors Hollywood scripts. In the meantime, she deals with a daughter trying (mostly not) to get off methadone. There is the Deaf Lady. There is Hollis, a male friend. First husband, second husband. A cat. It seems that this narrator really doesn’t have it together, mentally, but she does her best. And if I’m right about the narrator’s mental state, the author knocks this one out of the park. TUES: A Writer's Wit | Barbara Cooney WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Betsy Byars THURS: A Writer's Wit | Randy Shilts FRI: My Book World | Russell Freedman, Lincoln: A Photobiography MY BOOK WORLD![]() Freudenberger, Nell. The Limits. New York: Knopf, 2024. This novel of some scope develops several strands. Nathalie, a French biologist working in the South Pacific, sends her daughter off to New York City to live with her father and stepmother. The teen Pia does not like anyone, it seems: her mother, her father, and most assuredly her pregnant stepmother, a high school English teacher named Kate. All of whom do flip-flops to communicate with her. The only person she seems to connect with is a girl named Athyna (pronounced like the Greek figure, go figure)—a student of Kate’s with whom she has a nurturing relationship. To complicate things Pia is “in love with” Raffi, a thirty-year-old Tahitian who serves as Nathalie’s fixer. Of course, it is more of an inappropriate crush, and her affections have not been returned in kind. Still, she believes something is there. The narrative profiles the physical limits of the natural world but also explores the limits of human relationships. I enjoyed the author’s first book, Lucky Girls, much more. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Coventry Patmore WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Junichiro Tanizaki THURS: A Writer's Wit | Robyn Carr FRI: My Book World | Bill Moyers, Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times
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MY BOOK WORLD![]() McDermott, Alice. Absolution. New York: Farrar, 2023. This is a woman’s book, which is in no way meant to denigrate it. In fact, I find myself reading mostly women novelists these days. This novel, set in early 1960s Vietnam, is told from the viewpoint of a “wife,” not a military wife, but close to it. Her fresh, new husband is a civilian worker for the US military. Still, the narrator, Patricia, must hobnob with all the other wives. Her story seems to be the dawning of women’s awareness of their “place” in society at the time: a wife is a support system for her husband. Full stop. McDermott structures the novel in a fascinating and engrossing manner. It doesn’t take long to realize that Patricia is addressing someone, a “you” (a child, a daughter of a friend) even if it took me some pages to figure out. In Part III, the daughter takes over the narration as an adult. At the very end, Patricia adds sort of a coda to the entire story. The novel seems epistolary in nature even if it is not written in the form of letters because Patricia addresses the entire story to this other person, and vice versa in Part III. It might be puzzling if it weren’t for the fine clues that McDermott leaves for readers. You simply must pay attention. Her subtlety in creating difficult scenes is magnificent. At the very end, Patricia who has experienced multiple miscarriages is “given” a small beautiful Vietnamese girl with but one scarring birthmark on her face. Patricia is overwhelmed but takes the girl to her Saigon home, to wait for her husband whom she has not told. By the same token, she has learned from a friend that they’re going back to America soon; her husband has failed to keep her in the loop about it, so she feels she has a leg up on him, something to balance the power between them. Then a really odd thing transpires. I won’t spoil the scene, but the author manages to take readers completely off guard by what happens next, though it may be the most logical—and the best answer for all concerned. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | George Orwell WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Aubrey Plaza THURS: A Writer's Wit | Alice McDermott FRI: My Book World | Julie Satow, The Plaza: The Secret Life of America's Most Famous Hotel MY BOOK WORLD![]() Towles, Amor. Table for Two: Fictions. New York: Viking, 2024. These six lengthy stories and one novella stand as jewels in Towles’s already glittering list of works: A Gentleman in Moscow being my favorite. These works exhibit the same inventiveness and wit. My favorite story, perhaps, is “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett.” Touchett is a young writer who moves to NYC at the turn of this century. He finds work, toiling for a Mr. Pennybrook, a “purveyor of used and rare editions.” Pennybrook is much more, as Touchett soon finds out. Because of Timothy’s ability to mimic handwritings, he is lured into “signing” editions, which Pennybrook then pawns off as the real thing, providing Timothy with what seems like a hefty bonus to a young man attempting to live in the city ($50 per signature). Of course, readers can imagine where this sort of behavior leads, but it’s how they arrive at that point: what Touchett must experience before experiencing his comeuppance. The author’s approach seems a bit Dickensian but also somewhat like metafiction, in which he turns to his readership and reveals perhaps his own points of view. In the novella, Eve in Hollywood, set in 1938, one Evelyn Ross takes a train to Chicago, but instead of meeting her parents who have driven in from Indiana, she boards one to Los Angeles. Ross is beautiful save for one thing: she bears a long scar across her face, which turns some away. Perhaps because of the scar, she has learned to bear rejection and doesn’t worry about such behavior. She marches to her own drum. Towles has lifted this character from his first novel, a curious idea but one I admire (sometimes writers are just not finished with a character), and takes her on this noir-like voyage of mayhem and murder. Enough said. If you’re a fan at all of Towles’s work, you will enjoy this delightful collection of “Fictions,” as he forms his book’s subtitle. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Miriam Toews WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Susan Dodd THURS: A Writer's Wit | Margaret Fuller FRI: My Book World | Sharot & Sunstein, Look Again
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THURS: A Writer's Wit | John Galt FRI: My Book World | Barbara McQuade, Attack from Within MY BOOK WORLD![]() Dufresne, John. Johnny Too Bad: Stories. New York: Norton, 2005. Of the nineteen stories, I particularly enjoyed reading “Based on a True Story,” “Epithalamion,” “Talk Talk Talk,” the title story, and “Squeeze the Feeling.” The latter may be the “best.” In a way, it “links” together a number of other stories in the same collection (such a popular editorial choice) by reprising several characters featured earlier. In “Squeeze” a writer lives with his female friend and Spot, his dog. Girlfriend gets pregnant and loses baby, but Spot, a supersensitive creature, comforts her (he possesses other powers). Dufresne displays his superb talents when in the space of just more than a page he takes readers on an emotional roller coaster climax. The man and woman are drinking in their car, and an officer detains them. When he learns of the miscarriage, he drops the citation. The officer then returns and shares a similar event which has occurred in his own life and has not been able to speak with anyone about it (including his wife). Dufresne creates an emotional turn of events in such a short distance, yet readers may weep because the exchange is so honest, so real—as are all the stories in this collection. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Annie Dillard WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Bobbie Ann Mason THURS: A Writer's Wit | Jon Galt FRI: My Book World | Barbara McQuade, Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America MY BOOK WORLD![]() Stadler, Matthew. The Sex Offender. New York: Grove, 2000 (1994). Stadler is a unique and gifted writer. In this 1994 novel, he relates the tale of a thirty-year-old man charged with molesting one of his pupils, a twelve-year-old boy, Dexter. I say “tale,” because the man’s incarceration does not happen as it would in the America we know—with jail time, a trial, and imprisonment or institutionalization or both. No, in this fanciful land (seems European in nature), the former teacher is plopped into therapy. One type is the talking kind conducted with the Doctor-General. Another is an “aversive” type in which he is to associate his love for Dexter with negative stimuli. It doesn’t work, of course. And ironically, the teacher finds another young boy, Hakan, upon whom he lavishes his love. Only this time, as far as I can tell, he does not engage sexually with the youth, only emotionally. And no one ever knows of their relationship! So many “odd” elements to the narrative. The teacher also knows magically how to perform a kind of facelift, an element that figures heavily into the novel’s resolution. His therapist, Doctor-General, is experimenting with the notion of replacing a human’s brain so that one’s impulses become “normal.” But nothing seems normal in this novel. The teacher still loves Dexter and insists that the boy loves him. However, the Doctor-General disabuses him of this notion, informing him that the boy is very unhappy (we have no idea if this is true or not, or why he is unhappy). In the end, the teacher believes he has fooled officials into thinking he is “cured” and hoping for release. Yet they proclaim he is not cured and perform a simple kind of castration on him. Snip snip, like that! And now finally, one understands the cover illustration, as the teacher dresses as a woman to attend an important function. Odd, odd, odd. But a great book because it forces us to consider a subject, that thirty years later, is still taboo. Were the Greeks and Romans “sex offenders,” too, or were they, in some manner, ahead of their time? It’s a notion worth considering, and this satiric look (partially) helps us to see its possibilities. Coming Next: TUES, MAR 5: A Writer's Wit | Leslie Marmon Silko WEDS, MAR 6: A Writer's Wit | Gabriel García Márquez THURS, MAR 7: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Moon FRI, MAR 8: My Book World | Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
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WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Erma Bombeck THURS: A Writer's Wit | Kimball Allen FRI: My Book World | Matthew Stadler, The Sex Offender MY BOOK WORLD![]() McEwan, Ian. Saturday. New York: Doubleday, 2006. McEwan always places his characters in such precarious but interesting situations. In this novel, an eminent London surgeon witnesses a plane crashing at Heathrow airport—out his bedroom window—early one Saturday morning. He immediately prepares himself to leave the house; he will be needed to help clean up the carnage. At first, one thinks that this event is the inciting event of the novel. It is not, merely foreshadowing (the plane, piloted by two Russians, crashes in foam, and all survive). Later in the morning, the surgeon finds that a street has been blocked off, but he ignores the police and drives to his destination in his expensive Mercedes. There he is sideswiped by a cad and his two buddies, who try to hold him up for damages (a lopped-off side mirror), but it is the cad who has initiated the accident, and so the surgeon refuses, suffering a punch in the chest for his trouble. He notices the cad’s physical characteristics and determines that the man has (what will turn out to be) Huntington’s disease. His conference with the cad softens the young man, and they part. But one realizes, like the proverbial bad penny, the three cads are to surface again. I won’t spoil the ending. I will say that McEwan turns what could have been a maudlin conclusion into one that is both realistic and satisfying literarily. No one character gets off too easily, nor does one suffer too much. A lot like real life for most of us. Coming Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ellen Gilchrist WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Erma Bombeck THURS: A Writer's Wit | Kimball Allen FRI: My Book World | Matthew Stadler, The Sex Offender MY BOOK WORLD![]() Brown, Christopher. Tropic of Kansas. New York: HarperCollins, 2017. I’ve so enjoyed Christopher Brown’s monthly newsletter in which he examines the environment in which he lives—in and around Austin, Texas. It is thoughtful, well-researched, and often he includes strong photographs demonstrating either positive or negative aspects of the local ecology. It is probably the mark of an excellent writer that (in this case) he can switch from one genre of writing to another. At the same time, I find this novel wanting. Much of this stance may be my fault. I don’t usually read futuristic fiction. I don’t care for fiction where there are too many characters to keep track of (oh, my aging brain). I find myself not caring much about any of them. However, the two main characters—a young man and his half-sister—attempt to make contact with one another after being separated. This dystopian (I think) novel takes place when a vast region in the middle of the country is dubbed the Tropic of Kansas. This facile allusion to Henry Miller’s novel also sets up the extended metaphor of wasteland. (And since I grew up in Kansas, the metaphor is not lost on me—although I could be a bit insulted.) Tania has worked for the government but now is a lone wolf. Her brother, on his own since a child, is a wunderkind of chase and escape. The entire novel is plot driven, alternating Tania’s chapters with those of her brother, Sig. I tend to enjoy novels that are more character driven. Action, action, action—it gets a bit tiring without some reflection on the part of the characters. After all, the United States of America has more or less imploded. A bunch of ragtags are trying to put it back together, and yet no one seems to give much thought to what they are doing. I may be missing the point of Tropic of Kansas, and my apologies to the author if I am. As I once said to my parents when being introduced to a new food, “I’m trying to like it.” Coming Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Maureen F. McHugh WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Frederick Douglass THURS: A Writer's Wit | Susan Brownmiller FRI: My Book World | Ian McEwan, Saturday MY BOOK WORLD![]() Egan, Jennifer. Manhattan Beach. New York: Scribner, 2017. From the Acknowledgements section of this novel, one may deduce that Egan took up to a decade to produce it. The tome is a historical novel of epic proportions set during WW II, with so much to research, right? A young woman works at a dull job measuring manufactured parts to make sure their sizes are correct. This woman named Anna is bored; rides a bike during her forty-five-minute lunch rather than choke down a sandwich from home with the marrieds, women who belittle her ambitions. She establishes a rapport with her supervisor, however, and with his help, goes on to become a diver, the first woman in New York to don a 250-pound diving suit and repair the skins of warships. Egan’s research makes her underwater scenes some of the most realistically invigorating I’ve ever read. Meanwhile, Anna maintains a home life: a beautiful mother who is a former performer, a somewhat peripatetic father who deserts the family without explanation, and a sister disabled with an unnamed affliction (one might deduce the child is stricken with cerebral palsy), but that the disease is unidentified adds to its mystery, makes the child a wondrous, angel-faced enigma, whom Anna misses achingly when her sister dies. As the father has already disappeared from the scene, her mother moves to her childhood home in Minnesota, leaving Anna the family apartment to herself. A third strand of the novel concerns itself with Anna’s father who crosses paths with a man from the underbelly of New York. Yet these men both maintain at least a superficial appearance of respectability, until the dirty business of doing illegal acts finally destroys them both. To avoid more spoilers, suffice it to say that each man winds up having a profound effect on Anna’s life. A father who leaves to service the war effort with the merchant marines. And the other man, the mystery man little Anna meets in the very first scene of the novel, well, his role is profound, too. The conclusion of the novel, rather than serving as the denouement (neatly tying up loose ends like an Agatha Christie mystery), acts more like a coda (featuring extensions or reelaborations of earlier themes) you might note at the end of a musical composition. It serves more as the logical culmination to the crazed life a young woman lives in the 1940s, at the height of a war altering life worldwide. To me, Manhattan Beach should also be a Pulitzer Prize-winner, like Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (superbly noted for its nonlinear spectacularism). But what do I know. I’m merely a faithful reader of Egan’s work, madly in love with her intelligence, her perfect sentences, her mastery of structure, and most important, her incorruptible and universal understanding of the human condition. Brava! Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Christopher Marlowe WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Laura Ingall's Wilder THURS: A Writer's Wit | Martin Buber FRI: My Book World | Christopher Brown, Tropic of Kansas
MY BOOK WORLD![]() Alvarez, Julia. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. New York: Plume, 1992 (1991). A lovely and memorable book. In a formal sense, Alvarez tells this story in reverse chronological order: Part I portrays 1989-1972; Part II, 1970-1960; and Part III, 1960-1956. In reality, however, she may feel free to flit from this event to that so that all time periods seem of the same era. What the form accomplishes may be that the author begins her saga with when this disenfranchised family from the Dominican Republic must flee to the US, a turbulent period for her country and her family. Then we slowly work our way back in time, to end with the García family’s halcyon days just prior to the purge: a big house with servants, aunts, uncles and cousins living next door. A life they must sacrifice when they move north, where others make fun of their accents (until they expunge them from their lips, to survive). The day the Dominican police come searching for their father who has stealthily hidden in a secret compartment behind the wall of the master bathroom. Some chapters are told from the third-person, but many are shared by way of first-person through the eyes one of the four titular sisters. Each has her own voice, her own personality. The novel ends with a quiet story in which one sister invades the coal shed where she finds a mother cat and her kittens. The girl steals one of the kittens and names it Schwartz, perhaps after FAO Schwartz toy store in New York, from which the García father has brought his daughters various trinkets to play with. The cat becomes a metaphor, a nightmare the woman continues to have in adulthood: “There are still times I wake up at three o’clock in the morning and peer into the darkness. At that hour and in that loneliness, I hear her, a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life, her magenta mouth opening, wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art” (290). Wow, what a shouted whisper of an ending! Coming Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Karen Armstrong WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Georgia O'Keeffe THURS: A Writer's Wit | Chinua Achebe FRI: My Book World | Casey McQuiston, Red, White, and Royal Blue |
AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
http://amazon.com/author/rjespers Archives
January 2025
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