Blog - www.richardjespers.com

Those Gorgeous García Girls

11/10/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.
Neil Gaiman
Author of American Gods
Born November 10, 1960

N. Gaiman

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

A TOUGHIE, MCGLUE

11/3/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.
Terrence McNally
Author of Love! Valour! Compassion!
Born November 3, 1938

T. McNally

MY BOOK WORLD

Moshfegh, Ottessa. McGlue. New York: Penguin, 2019 (2014).

A rough little book, this. And one that encapsulates a man’s short life within the span of 145 pages. But is it set in the 19th century? It would seem so: no cars, no televisions, no phones. Only horse and cart, books, bars, and whores for entertainment. Is it about sailors? Would seem to be: McGlue, a young man, is at sea much of the time, at sea with regard to his life, accused of the murder of his best mate, Johnson. Yet he can’t recall; a certain blow to his head in a brawl keeps his memories at bay, even while he awaits in prison—without drink, which he misses terribly. Does the book have a homophobic tinge to it, or is it merely a representation of a sailor’s life in the 19th century—a time in which McGlue refers to the cabin boy as a fag or fagger? Is this slim tome Moby Dick (sans the whale) compressed into a story Melville couldn’t tell or couldn’t have gotten published in his time?

Yet I’m also mystified by McGlue’s use of language. At first, it seems readers have been transported into 19th-century Massachusetts, but the author can’t decide whether McGlue is an uneducated galoot or a literary scholar. At one point, he proclaims, “. . . just anything but not to have to be here, sitting, lying down with myself like this” (64). Oh, one thinks, his scant schooling has remained intact. He has conjugated correctly the verb for reclining. Fine, but McGlue is not consistent. A few pages later he says, “I just lay down, cold as it is, until Dwelly disappears” (71). As a commoner, has he backslid into conflating the verb “lie” with its cousin “lay”? Perhaps, you say, the author is portraying McGlue’s unpolished education: his battered brain retrieving the correct verb only some of the time. Okay. But what about this example? At one point, McGlue remembers to employ the subjunctive mood, signaling the hypothetical nature of a situation: “If he were here I’d throw an arm around him, pat his head and thank him” (107). Most uneducated would just say, If he was here. Several sentences down, McGlue says, “Before me was a gentlemen . . .” (107). Why does he use the plural instead of “gentleman?” Is it an antiquated linguistic quirk I’m unaware of, or is he once again attempting to be blue collar when his earlier instinct is to be more erudite?

Some may wonder why I would belabor this issue, but I continue to be puzzled. Are McGlue’s inconsistencies genuinely his, or do they belong to the author? Does she have an adequate grasp of her characterization of him, of the language? If she’s unsure about McGlue’s usage, then what does it say, on the whole, about her story? Which, by the way, is terribly engrossing, a mini-dip into what an 1800s “sea shanty” might have been. Because whatever else the novella may be, it seems to delve into the love and affection two men have for one another at a time in which matie Johnson has no proper way for him to express his carnal desires for McGlue. And the conflict ends in death . . . for both. I think.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Jean Chatzky
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Margaret Mitchell
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Ivan Turgenev
FRI: My Book World | Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

DON'T DRESS BOYS IN BLUE

10/20/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
[T]he only rule . . . I know, [for writers] is that they write and they write some more and then they write still more and they keep on writing . . . .
Frederic Dannay [Ellery Queen]
Author of Ellery Queen Mysteries
Born October 20, 1905

F. Dannay [E. Queen]

MY BOOK WORLD

Johnson, George M. All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto. New York: Farrar, 2020.

All I can say is I wish this young adult book had been around when I was in high school—back in the middle of the last century. Yet it is odd that this man, thirty-eight years my junior, goes through many of the traumas I do in my youth: trying to maintain two psyches, one private and one public; two lives, one inner and one outer. I most love the details of Johnson’s college life, in which he joins a fraternity (of long-distinguished African-American lineage), half of whom are also gay, and the other half are OK with his orientation. He limns a very sensitive picture of his first time with another guy, one experience as a top and one as a bottom. The descriptions are real, even erotic, but not in themselves titillating. We also are privileged to read of his loving middle-class family life in New Jersey. This book should be available by way of multiple copies in every high school in America. Sadly, we live in a time when public libraries are being besieged by book burners, I mean, book banners, who serve to remove such tomes from our students’ shelves. I plan to buy copies and make sure they’re available in my city’s public libraries—or perhaps the little free libraries that pop up in towns. Maybe we all can do our part.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Moss Hart
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Tyler
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Hillary Clinton
FRI: My Book World | Alexander Chee, The Queen of the Night

DEMON COPPERHEAD: TODAY'S DAVID COPPERFIELD

10/6/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
We do not judge great art. It judges us.
Caroline Gordon
Author of None Shall Look Back
Born October 6, 1895

C. Gordon

MY BOOK WORLD

Kingsolver, Barbara. Demon Copperhead: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2022.

At first, I feel that the lad’s name, Demon Copperhead, seems a bit contrived—perhaps trying too hard to BE David Copperfield—as Kingsolver is forthcoming about her boilerplate use of Dickens’s beloved book. But as the pages fly by, his name takes on an earned significance. Eventually Demon Copperhead will become the name of his comic book character—artist Demon has a natural talent that a sensitive teacher nurtures along the way. Kingsolver’s novel is about a twenty-first century orphan, one who loses his father before he is born and loses his mother as a child to her drug addictions. Not just any “drugs.” And it is not an easy life, as Demon proclaims.

“Addiction is not for the lazy. The life has no ends of hazards, deadly ambushes lying in wait, and that’s just the drugs, not even discussing the people. If I was a fuckhead, I was one that knew how to apply himself . . . I’d only ever lived one way, by devoting myself completely” (426).

Kingsolver also beats the hell out of Purdue Pharmacy in this narrative, how the corporation invades Appalachia and actually targets poor people. Aching people who are injured in mines, aching athletes (like Demon)—anybody in pain. The afflicted line up at a pill mill in their local strip mall where a real doctor prescribes real Oxycontin (for a price). Then the person may use it all or peddle it (or part of it) in the parking lot. Persons can score Fentanyl, too. The whole ball of druggy wax. Demon loses his live-in girlfriend to drugs. Demon himself gets hooked, as a star (for a short time) high school football player with a painful knee injury. Kingsolver concludes the saga with a proper Dickensian “happy ending,” at least happier than it might have been had he wound up dead, that is.

The novel is a rough read, emotionally. I seldom cry when reading aloud (to my partner in the evenings), but several times, Kingsolver crept up on me, and I found the simplicity of her language and her understanding of humanity uncanny. When Demon is fostered by the coach, Demon offers, to the housekeeper, to do his own laundry, his own cooking.

“She laughed and said not to be putting her out of her job. She said mine was just to be a little boy. Weird. I’d not had that job before” (224). This passage put me flat on the floor. Evocative for adults who’ve given up part or all of their childhood.

If you can withstand all the bad shit that happens to mostly loveable characters (experiencing a sad story vicariously is always easier than doing it for real), the book is quite a rewarding read.

Coming Next:
No Posts, October 10-13
TUES Oct. 17: A Writer's Wit | Elinor Glyn
WEDS Oct. 18: A Writer's Wit | Wendy Wasserstein
THURS Oct. 19: A Writer's Wit | Dan Flores
FRI: My Book World | George M. Johson, All Boys Aren't Blue

NOT CRACKED-UP TO BE

9/29/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all.
Miguel de Cervantes
Author of
Born September 29, 1547

M. de Cervantes

MY BOOK WORLD

Fitzgerald. F. Scott. The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson. With Letters to Fitzgerald from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe, and John Dos Passos. And essays and Poems by Paul Rosenfeld, Glenway Wescott, John Dos Passos, John Peal Bishop and Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions, 1956 (1931).

There is much to admire about this collection of essays and varied materials, some written by Fitzgerald and some penned by other contemporaneous literati. The title is derived from the author’s essay by the same name, in which he rather portrays his demise as a writer. It is a bit self-flagellating, if not a bit inaccurate. The weakest part of this tome may be “The Notebooks,” in which, by category (Anecdotes, Descriptions of Humanity, Karacters, to name a few), Fitzgerald displays journal entry after journal entry. I’ve seen this done to great effect by the likes of David Sedaris in his journals (which have been carefully edited) and John Cheever’s, as well. But here, this section contains around 150 pages of material that should probably have remained private. Some entries are so fragmented as to be nonsensical (except to the author); others seem overwritten and therefore of little value to the reader. In a strange aside, I must say a number of these entries seem to speak to Fitzgerald’s preoccupation/fascination with “homosexuals”:

“I really loved him, but of course it wore out like a love affair. The fairies have spoiled all that”(99).
“Fairies?” Really?

“Fairy who fell for a wax dummy” (155).

“He had once been a pederast and he had perfected a trick of writing about all his affairs as if his boy friends had been girls, thus achieving feminine types of a certain spurious originality” (166).
Is “he” Fitzgerald himself?

“When I like men I want to be like them—I want to lose the outer qualities that give me my individuality and be like them. I don’t want the man; I want to absorb into myself all the qualities that make him attractive and leave him out. I cling to my own innards. When I like women I want to own them, to dominate them, to have them admire me” (169).
Honestly sounds as if the man has an identity problem.

“Fairy can only stand young girls on stage, where they’re speaking other people’s lines” (201).

“Fairies: Nature’s attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them” (205).

“The two young men could only groan and play sentimental music on the phonograph, but presently they departed; the fire leaped up, day went out behind the window and Forrest had rum in his tea” (214).

“to Gerald and Sara Murphy
Honey—that goes for Sara too…” (282).
A nice, jocular greeting in a letter. Ha ha.

As I said, a strange preoccupation this man seems to have with gay men. He can’t decide whether he admires them or deplores them, and could he possibly be one himself?

In all, however, I wish I had read this collection while I was teaching The Great Gatsby and a few of Fitzgerald’s short stories to high school AP students years ago. Doing so might have informed my pedagogy in a superior manner.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Gore Vidal
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Heidi Hayes Jacobs
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Caroline Gordon
FRI: My Book World | Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead: A Novel

WEBSITE UPDATE

9/18/2023

I meant to observe this website's 10th anniversary in 2021, but the Covid pandemic seemed to put the kibosh on that for a number of reasons. If you have time, feel free to browse the six tabs or pages by clicking on the links below. Each one sports a new look and updated information.
Home
Books
Journals
Blog
Photos (Scroll down to view new photos 2019-2023)
Podcasts
Thanks for helping me celebrate 12 years online! RJ

Women's Chemistry

9/1/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
We speak of educating our children. Do we know that our children also educate us?
Lydia Sigourney
Author of Letters to Young Ladies
Born September 1, 1791

L. Sigourney

MY BOOK WORLD

Garmus, Bonnie. Lessons in Chemistry. New York: Doubleday, 2022.

This novel may be one of the best that’s come out in ten years. It deserves all the accolades it has received thus far. I could see this as director Greta Gerwig’s next film project—another quirky woman’s story. [Funny thing, I wrote this post before learning that Apple TV+ will premier a streaming version of the book on October 13. Starring Brie Larson as Elizabeth Zott. Previews look good!]

Garmus sets the novel in the 1950s, but the protagonist, Elizabeth Zott, brings to the surface all the sexism and misogyny that professional women must face during that era. Zott falls in love with a fellow scientist, Calvin Evans, while they work side-by-side in the same commercial laboratory. With no intention of ever marrying or having children, she finds herself pregnant—just as her beloved lover (with whom she cohabitates) suddenly dies. Though she has only a master’s degree, her research is superior to the man in charge of her work and who steals it and claims it as his own.

Zott suffers a great deal: a single, unwed mother at this time period is all but spat upon by everyone in her community. Two saving features of her life: a nosy neighbor, Harriet, who volunteers to be Elizabeth’s babysitter and sometimes cook and housekeeper. Zott is also in tune with her dog that she names Six-Thirty. She proceeds to “teach” him nearly a thousand words. Readers get to see what the dog is thinking, as he helps Elizabeth navigate life.

So many wonderful features to this novel, it would be a shame to spoil them all by listing them here. Suffice it to say that Garmus has created a complex novel, yet one that reads simply. She does such an excellent job of guiding readers through the complexity by way of reminders of events that have occurred in the past—without seeming repetitious. Quite a gift. Get the book. Read it. Laugh out loud as I did. [Then watch the movie.] Cry during the denouement, as all the pieces, like an Agatha Christie novel, come clattering into place. You won’t be sorry.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Matt Bell
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Molly Ivins
THURS: A Writer's Wit | William Saroyan
FRI: My Book World | Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic

Not Good for Nigerian Gays

8/25/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
When you’re a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of a normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.
Brian Moore, Irish-American
Author of Lies of Silence
Born August 25, 1921

B. Moore

My Book World

Somtochukwu, Ani Kayode. And Then He Sang a Lullaby. New York: Roxane Gay, 2023.

It would be a great understatement to say that the country of Nigeria is an unsafe place for the LGBTQ+ community to live. In this debut novel, Somtochukwu takes readers through the lives and loves of two young men. For one, neither set of parents offers any support for their gay sons. One man has a close relationship with his sister, which helps. Still, these two college men are on their own. On their own when one is beaten up by his very roommates. On his own in almost every context of his life. For those of us who complain about our LGBTQ+ lives in the US, we need only read this novel to realize we must be thankful for what we have and continue to fight against such bigotry here and abroad.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Matt Bell
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Molly Ivins
THURS: A Writer's Wit | William Saroyan
FRI: My Book World | Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

Santini Not so Great

8/18/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
My father was a very unhappy person, very sarcastic, and my mother was very nervous and worried about what people thought. They weren’t monsters, but it wasn’t a good childhood.
Paula Danziger
Author of Desperate Characters
Born August 18, 1944

P. Danziger

My Book World

Conroy, Pat. The Great Santini: A Novel. New York: Dial, 2013 (2004, 1976).

So many men of America (of the world) have experienced abusive relationships with their fathers—in one fashion or another. This novel artfully explores one that may be representative. Bull Meecham, WWII veteran, is a crack jet fighter pilot in the 1960s South, often posted far away from home for months on end (and where is home? when the family must move once every year or two). Ben, his son, hates his father: hates him for treating his children like soldiers, hates him for striking him, hates him for verbal abuse. The wife serves as intermediary between the children and Bull, but she can only do so much; all four children suffer in some way. One wonders how the tension, which is high, can grow as you turn the pages, but build it does.

Ben, a fine high school basketball player, is challenged during a game one night, to quit taking abuse from an opposing player. If Ben doesn’t do as he is told by his father (loudly from the grandstand), Ben will suffer—regardless of the coach’s wishes. Seems Ben suffers anyway. When Ben decks the opposing player, breaking his nose and injuring him mightily, Ben is ejected from the game, perhaps never to play again. Pleases his father but neither his coach nor his community. No spoiler here: suffice it to say something tragic happens to the family, and Conroy most beautifully portrays how a son can both hate and love his father and suffer both emotions simultaneously. A tour de force.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Dorothy Parker
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Merrie Spaeth
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Stephen Fry
FRI: My Book World | Ani Kayode Somtochukwu,
And Then He Sang a Lullaby

Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Whereabouts'

8/11/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they've been at other times.
Angus Wilson
Author of The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot
Born August 11, 1913

A. Wilson

My Book World

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Whereabouts. Written in Italian and translated by the author. New York: Vintage, 2021.

This one-hundred-fifty-seven-page novel is divided into forty-six titled chapters, all in the form of prepositional phrases indicating, as the title suggests, place. Whereabouts. On the Sidewalk. On the Balcony. In the Sun. At the Villa. Even Upon Waking. Waking is a place, after all. Only Lahiri could create so much life with so little. The first-person narrative is told by a female Italian professor of literature living, we assume, not in Rome but a smaller, less satisfying city. She shares, in bits like chocolates from fluted paper containers, her life. After an unsatisfactory relationship with a man (told in flashback), she prefers living alone, prefers being childless, prefers to visit her ailing mother once a week. She wavers only a little between her preferred solitude and connecting with others: her neighbors, her university pupils, favored merchants. It is a hard-won battle, but she seems to win it with dignity and poise. An immensely satisfying read.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Linda Ellerbee
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | William Kennedy
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Jonathan Franzen
FRI: My Book World | Pat Conroy, The Great Santini

Thomas Mann: Magician for All Times

6/16/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
One of the tragedies of modern times is that people have come to believe that something said by someone in the past, perhaps for illustrative or provocation purposes, actually represents that person's beliefs at the time.
Idries Shah
Author of Tales of the Dervishes
Born June 16, 1924

I. Shah

My Book World

Tóibín, Colm. The Magician: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2021.

There aren’t enough superlatives that can be ascribed to this novel, the author of which has published twenty-four other books. This fictionalized story of literary giant, Thomas Mann, is both riveting and sobering. The young Mann writes poetry exalting his also young lovers, all male. But in his Germany he cannot get out of marrying. And in fact, he does marry a woman he loves, and they produce quite a family. The novel traces their lives as they unfold in pre-World War II Europe, and as their lives extend to America, where the Mann’s take up residence. The book as well traces the processes or problems he incurs in writing some of his important works, including Death in Venice. It seems that Tóibín utilizes only the most important details or facts, or otherwise, his five hundred page novel might be twice the journey. A joy to read if you care about world literature and its important authors.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Lillian Hellman
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Ian McEwan
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Adam Schiff
FRI: My Book World | Pat Conroy, The Great Santini

Irving's Last Book?

5/12/2023

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"
Born May 12, 1812

E. Lear

My Book World

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

Less, More Lost Than Ever

5/5/2023

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

H. Sienkiewicz

My Book World

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, attempting 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

Desperation Creates 'Character'

4/21/2023

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

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

'Mysterious' Childhood

4/14/2023

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

A. Toynbee

My Book World

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

A Writer's Wit: Eudora Welty

4/13/2023

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

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

Plotting Marriage

4/7/2023

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

W. Wordsworth

My Book World

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

Lahiri: Among the Best

3/3/2023

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

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

Basement Living

2/24/2023

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

My Book World

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

'woman in White' Is Illusive

2/17/2023

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

D. Canfield Fisher

My Book World

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

Swim | Pond | Rain

2/3/2023

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

W. Bagehot

My Book World

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

Mother and Daughter: Oil and Water

1/6/2023

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

E. Strout

My Book World

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

Some 'Customs' Change

12/9/2022

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

G. Belli

My Book World

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

Oh, Strout Wins with 'William'

11/18/2022

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

M. Atwood

My Book World

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

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

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

'The Dutch House" a Big Novel

10/7/2022

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

M. Alexander

My Book World

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

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

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

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