Blog - www.richardjespers.com

Past Is Still Present: AIDS

8/7/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Modern life has gotten so strange, we all get 150 emails and text messages a day, and it's hard when things are moving that quickly to keep that sense of wonder about being alive.
Brit Marling
Co-Writer for film Sound of My Voice
Born August 7, 1983

B. Marling

Guibert, Hervé. To the friend who did not save my life. South Pasadena: Semiotexte, 2020 (1990).

It’s difficult to know what I think of this book, thirty years after it is first published. On the one hand, it is a fair representation of what the times are like in 1991 Paris. When the author dies at thirty-six from AIDS, I am forty-three—very much a part of the same demographic. I’ve taken an HTLV test which claims I am negative. Whew.

Yet there is no real relief for anyone: neither the men and women who test positive and will soon die nor for their friends who have partaken of the same risky behaviors and remain free. Guibert portrays for gay Frenchmen, as do many American gay writers at the time, the devastation that overtakes our community from coast to coast. On the other hand, after thirty years, most of the scientific information Guibert possesses is redundant or has been proven wrong. It’s painful to read about either party.

Even if this work functions as a sort of roman à clef by not naming names, it certainly portrays the dastardly acts of treacherous friends. A character named Muzil is supposedly the noted philosopher Michel Foucault; Marine is based on the life of actor, Isabelle Adjani; and yet “Bill,” Guibert’s friend of the title remains a mystery, a traitor who brags about, as a Miami pharmaceutical executive, getting Guibert in on the ground floor of a vaccine, but cruelly fails to do so. This book, a combination of linear and nonlinear elements, takes us back to the past, but it strangely plops us into the present of yet another untamable virus and directs us toward a future of even more death and destruction. Not a gay book in the original literary sense, but so gay in a tragic way.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki

Fabulous Indeed

7/31/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Addiction isn't about substance—you aren't addicted to the substance, you are addicted to the alteration of mood that the substance brings.
Susan Cheever
Author of Drinking in America
Born July 31, 1943

S. Cheever

My Book World

Epstein, Joseph. Fabulous Small Jews. Boston: Houghton, 2003.

There is so much to like about these eighteen stories mostly featuring characters over the age of sixty. As the title suggests, each protagonist is short, yet Epstein never makes a to-do about it, and indeed it is a point of irony because many of them, though short in stature, are not small people. In fact, Epstein pulls readers into every narrative about poor Jews, poor Jews who become comfortable or well-off, or Jews who have always had money. Most everyone in these Chicago-based stories attends good schools, earns good money. But money alone cannot in any way make up for the heartache they suffer: marriages ending in divorce; fathers who die in war; widows looking (or not) for a man to fill their lives.

Fabulous small Jews have their own stores, their own banks, their own restaurants and delis, their own you-name-its. Epstein very quietly limns the lives of Jews almost anywhere in the world: because of prejudices held against them for thousands of years they must band together to protect, coddle, nurture, and love one another. And yet, readers can’t help but love these characters, too: an old man belatedly gets to know his grandson (I cried); a man secretly writes poems about a woman and the executor of his will, to preserve the woman’s reputation, instead of burning the manuscript, spreads it to the four winds from his car window on the freeway; a man quietly helps another man to end his life. Is the act one of suicide, euthanasia, or murder? Epstein does not answer that question but leaves it to each reader to decide, and I admire his courage in taking such a stance.

A must-read for Gentiles (like me) and Jews alike.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life

'Animal Farm' Meets 'Nineteen eighty-four'

7/24/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Youth doesn't need friends—it only needs crowds.
Zelda Fitzgerald
Author of Save Me the Waltz
Born July 24, 1900

Z. Fitzgerald

My Book World

Arenas, Reinaldo. The Assault. Translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 1994.

Think Animal Farm meets Nineteen Eighty-Four. Arenas creates his own biting satire of what life is like for Cubans, homosexuals in particular, in Castro’s Communist Cuba. Rather than recreating this hell realistically (as he does in Before Night Falls), Arenas limns a dystopian animal world in which the narrator—a hardline, hateful, and clawed beast—searches out his mother so that he can kill her.

He also orders that any man (or woman) who dares to stare at an attired male animal’s crotch (even for a microsecond, as if one might discern such a move) will be annihilated. This cruelty is so absurd as to be laughable in a manner it would not be if portrayed realistically. I’m issuing no spoiler alert (oh, I guess this is it): narrator searches and searches for his wicked mother whom he hates with all his might, to no avail. Meantime, for his fine work killing queers, he is awarded one of the highest honors to be bestowed by the Represident. The narrator is shocked to learn that this represident is none other than his mother! He obtains a raging erection which is not allayed until he porks (to put it nicely) his own mother, she explodes into a million bits, and the narrator’s rage is finally released (ew). Ah, now that’s a climax: Killing queers and the Oedipal impulse all in one go.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Joseph Epstein's Stories Fabulous Small Jews

Those Who Oppose Die Alone

7/17/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.
Phyllis Diller,
Author of The Joys of Aging and How to Avoid Them
Born July 17, 1917

P. Diller

My Book World

Fallada, Hans. Every Man Dies Alone. Translated by Michael Hofmann, with an afterword by Geoff Wilkes. New York: Melville, 2009 (1947).

This novel, originally published in German in 1947, is the fictionalized story of a true-life married couple who denounce the Nazi regime. The couple are solid followers of Hitler until their only son is killed in battle. They then turn their anger outward in a quiet manner by handwriting postcards of denunciation which they deposit all over the city of Berlin. They carry on for over two years, placing nearly 300 cards without notice. Yet their campaign is basically a failure because most people who find the cards turn them into the Gestapo so that they do not themselves wind up in trouble. Due to a bit of carelessness, the couple are caught and wind up in prison. Fallada deftly portrays their ending as fearful but brave souls who have no problem talking back to prison officials.

Fallada concludes the novel on a positive note by bringing back into view a boy who, because of his terrible home life, has begun a life of crime until he is adopted by a caring and loving couple who help to change his ways. Fallada’s writing is very nineteenth century by way of its omniscient point-of-view in which we know what every character is thinking. He is also quite skilled in creating a large number of characters, yet giving the reader periodic hints about who is whom, thus keeping the narrative moving. Finally, he, from time to time, repeats or skillfully echoes his title, Every Man Dies Alone, in ways that expand its obvious or concrete meaning. Fallada’s novel is a keen reminder that freedom requires sacrifice, that no matter what culture we live in, we must always be on guard against its being taken away from us, or worse yet, that we hand it over without question.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Reinaldo Arenas's Novel The Assault

Harrison's Novellas Are Perfect

7/10/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Writers get embarrassed sometimes in talking about how much fun writing can be, but drafting is often really enjoyable. Often, you're tumbling in the dark, and you don't know where the story is going to lead.
Karen Russell,
Author of Swamplandia!
Born July 10, 1981

K. Russell

My Book World

Harrison, Jim. The Summer He Didn’t Die. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2005.

These three novellas, each one striking for its individuality, are immensely satisfying. The longer-than-a-story-but-shorter-than-a-novel format seems to be perfect for each narrative. My favorite character in The Summer He Didn’t Die, the title novella, is Berry, a child who is born with alcohol fetal syndrome. She is mute but indicates by her actions, quick and sprite-like, how she shall act upon the world and its many rules. Most of the action is of her family (excepting her wayward mother) evading Michigan’s children’s protective agency and depositing their lives over the border in Canada so that Berry can live out her life in peace. Republican Wives, hilarious for its verisimilitude (uncannily written for a male writer), takes readers inside the minds of three different women, friends since childhood, who have been hoodwinked for the last time by a man (also a college acquaintance) with whom they have all had affairs (mostly at different times). Tracking tells the story of an author who outlines his literary career and personal life, from feckless yet ardent college boy to a grandpa, finally finished with world travel and content to be near his grown children and grandchildren. The collection is a great testament to the novella form in which it is just the right length to tell each one of these stories.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone

The Poisonwood Bible: Stunning and Timeless

7/3/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
Author of The Yellow Wallpaper
Born July 3, 1860

C. Perkins Gilman

My Book World

Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.

In 1959, a Baptist minister, his wife, and his four daughters, leave their Bethlehem, Georgia home for a year of service to the Congo in Africa. The mother, Orleanna, opens the novel with a long lens; we learn right away she will lose one of her daughters, and so we read on patiently to see how such an event will unfold. Of course, we sort of forget, and we’re shocked when the youngest, Ruth May, is killed by a poisonous snake much later in the story after we have come, like her mother, to love her.

This expansive novel is divided into seven books, always a sign of what will be a sprawling narrative. Each book opens with a chapter narrated by Orleanna, the frazzled mother who dares not rile the ire of her preacher husband. The remaining chapters of each book are narrated alternatively by each one of the daughters: Rachel, a light-haired blonde, probably born about 1945, who has visions of high fashion and easy living in her life—having not much use for her father’s strict evangelical life; the twins, Leah and Adah, one a healthy adherent of her father’s ways (for a while), the latter injured before birth and who limps yet has a brain equal to her twin sister’s. The former will eventually marry a Congo native; Adah will return to Atlanta and become a doctor. Before her demise, Ruth May, the youngest, is a sprite, a child with her own language, her own worldview, a darting derring-do that will eventually serve to take her life.

Each chapter then widens our view of their village in the Congo as it survives an historical upheaval: one popular but revolutionary leader being killed within three months of his election, and the return to office of a corrupt man who will conspire with the West (mostly America) to spend thirty-five years amassing great wealth while his countrymen and women survive (or don’t) lives of poverty. One additional character, Mother Nature, or her evil sister, makes life at the least difficult, at the most, a disaster of magnificent proportions. In what feels like the climax, a giant wave of ants marauds their Congolese village, and its inhabitants must survive by, among other things, climbing trees until the rampage has passed. When this family returns to their house and accompanying buildings, they find only bones left where their chickens once roosted. The house is spotless, as if cleaned by a squad of maids. At this point, Oleanna gathers her three remaining children and abandons her husband. Now this is not as easy as it sounds. She has always served Nathan and his god with blind faithfulness, but now she sees that he is not well (think heart of darkness) and must save her remaining three daughters. Only she is not even able to do that. Rachel marries a South African man of questionable character (and three more men in serial monogamy). Leah marries her native. Adah returns to Georgia with her mother. It is a family broken in so many ways it takes an entire book to portray how. Oh, and the title? The poisonwood tree is an apt name because of the substance it oozes; its bible an apt metaphor for the despoliation of one family. A stunning, timeless read.

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Jim Harrison's The Summer He Didn't Die

Rule Follower or Skilled Manager?

6/26/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
We always look at the “Fortune 500,” and we say, men in power, but we don't look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dying in construction sites that aren't properly supervised for safety hazards.
Warren Farrell,
Author of The Boy Crisis
Born June 26, 1943

W. Farrell

My Book World

Murata, Sayaka. Convenience Store Woman. Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori. New York: Grove, 2018.

A compact book at 163 small pages, this novel is a more substantive read than one would think at first. The simple language that the narrator Keiko uses may lull the reader into thinking this will be a simple story. In a way, it is. This young Japanese woman who works in a convenient store shifts to a flashback about her childhood. There she reveals her odd personality, a certain problem with affect, in which she would like to cook and eat a beautiful little blue bird that has died, much to the horror of her mother. Then in primary school, when no teacher appears to break up a fight at recess, Keiko takes it upon herself to hit one of the boys on the skull with a spade. At that point, after getting into trouble, Keiko decides to become a little rule follower, making her, upon high school graduation, a perfect candidate for convenience store worker.

Keiko is unusually attuned to the store’s needs, both at the macro and micro levels—responding to the store’s needs the way a mother might respond to her children. Remaining single, without much apparent interest in sex, Keiko works part-time and sustains a secularly ascetic existence until she’s thirty-six. Then she meets a man, creating the novel’s conflict, and I won’t reveal the ending because it’s pretty odd and yet satisfying. I do have a question for the author. Keiko is often more skilled in managing the store than her male, mostly younger managers (eight of them in eighteen years). Why does her demonstrated competency (all her colleagues acknowledge her abilities) ever put her in a position to become a manager herself? Is this author Murata’s point, a comment on Japanese culture? Or is she more concerned with portraying people who happen not to fit the mold of ordinary citizens and how society treats such people?

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Tobias Wolff's Novel Old School

'Cleanness' a Superb Novel

5/22/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Let the bullets that rip through my brain smash through every closet door in the nation.
Harvey Milk
Born May 22,1930

H. Milk

My Book World

APOLOGIES to my readers: At the last minute I substituted my profile of Garth Greenwell's book for Alison Smith's. I shall post one of Smith's Name All the Animals in the near future.

Greenwell, Garth. Cleanness. New York: Farrar, 2020.

I didn’t make one annotation on first reading of this novel (and I shall read it again), in part because it held me spellbound and in part because I wanted to experience vicariously the joyride the unnamed narrator (except for Gospodar, the Bulgarian word for Mister) is taking through his young life.

Gospodar (Gospodine to his pupils) teaches accelerated English at a high school in Sofia, Bulgaria, sometime in the last decade, and unravels his story of love and loss. At the same time, our Gospodar employs the powers of travelogue to acquaint readers with a post-Soviet culture still burdened with its corrupt architecture (crumbling worse than the geopolitical realm itself). The novel is part language lesson: Gospodar translates (upon first mention) each Bulgarian word or phrase and in such a way that one is acquainted with the word’s fullness. At one point, a male sex partner Gospodar has met online calls him Bulgarian for bitch. But the narrator doesn’t leave it there, massaging the meaning within the context of the indigenous culture. The novel is part love story, in which the narrator meets a man he only calls R (every character is reduced to a single initial, in some way protecting the identities of his co-characters, almost creating the feel that one is absorbing a roman à clef). I’ve never read such sensual yet meaningful sex scenes (for want of a better term). At one point, the narrator makes love to his lover, R, taking perhaps twenty minutes to kiss every part of the man’s body. When he is finished, his partner is attempting to hide his tears, the fact that perhaps no one has ever loved him so completely. These scenes, though graphic, serve a larger purpose, never feeling pornographic (if there is such a thing) or gratuitous.

Ultimately, the narrator and R end their relationship, because R hails from Lisbon, and cannot see finding a way to earn a living in Bulgaria. In the last major scene of the novel, the narrator parties with a few young men who have graduated from his school the year before. The three of them get very drunk, and the teacher, Gospodar, makes a play for one of the young men. He is horrified by his own behavior yet is willing to give into it at the same time, if enticed or encouraged by the student. He withdraws from the party just before making a fool of himself or endangering his reputation as a responsible adult. Gospodar does this throughout the book, brings himself to some sort of brink, only to pull back after exploring the full impact that the act is about to make (sometimes within a few seconds), thus making the character more like all of us, ready to jump yet waiting to defer to a better angel.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men

Hyacinth Blue Is TimeLess

5/15/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
The mind and heart sometimes get another chance, but if anything happens to the poor old human frame, why, it’s just out of luck, that’s all.
Katherine Anne Porter
Born May 15, 1890

K. A. Porter

My Book World

Vreeland, Susan. Girl in Hyacinth Blue. New York: Penguin, 1999.

In contemporary times, a Philadelphia professor calls a colleague (who is an art scholar) into his locked study to reveal what he claims is an original work of the Dutch artist, Vermeer. The colleague argues against such a claim, but the man insists. He is in a bind because his father has confessed that he himself stole it from a Jewish home while he was working for the Nazis in WWII, but he cannot reveal such indicting provenance. Each succeeding chapter takes the reader farther back in history (à la the film The Red Violin) to reveal previous owners, right up to, the reader must assume, Vermeer himself. All owners are fascinated by the painting and yet must depend on its sale to save themselves or their family from financial disaster. The author explores the value of art. Is it entirely intrinsic, or is it monetary, or is it a bit of both? Vreeland manages to explore this unique idea in a poetic manner which is both compressed, yet expansive, a valuable topic for discussion. The novel is a timeless read, and I’m glad a friend recommended it to me long ago and that I finally took the time to read it.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Alison Smith's Name All the Animals

Look at Her!

3/27/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.
Thorne Smith
Born March 27, 1892

T. Smith

My Book World

Egan, Jennifer. Look at Me. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

I read Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad in 2012 to study how nonlinear plots work and enjoyed it very much. This earlier book, her second novel, is a bit more traditional although she does some very interesting things like presenting the main character’s chapters by way of first person but the rest of the chapters in third person; she also cuts, rotating quickly from one character’s point of view (omnisciently) to the next in one of the final chapters, to sustain suspense and perhaps coalesce their views into one. It would seem that the basic plot is that one Charlotte Swenson, a beautiful young fashion model is involved in a car accident, and the surgeon who puts her face back together does so (and I find this hard to believe) with eighty titanium screws just beneath the skin. Her face is still beautiful, but it is no longer her face. People don’t recognize her. She is invisible.

But Charlotte is not without curiosity, a certain inventiveness, to keep her life interesting after losing her livelihood (her booker can no longer get her any modeling jobs)—including a festive sex life. By her own recognizance she can identify what she calls the shadow self of almost any person with whom she comes in contact. Later in the novel, she encounters a man who will now direct a television special about her accident and recovery, in which she plays herself. Even though outwardly he is somewhat fit and sophisticated, she limns his shadow self as an insecure fat kid, the one lurking just beneath the surface of his life, his skin. Though Charlotte’s character is flawed, she leads us to believe she is an astute judge of character, and we tend to believe her.

As with any fine novel, there is a lot going on here. Egan weaves together the story that Charlotte and two other characters are destined to tell, along with a cast of supporting characters, who, in themselves, are fascinating: for one, Z, a young Middle Eastern would-be terrorist who seems to adapt to America quite well; also, a recently recovered alcoholic detective; a mysterious teacher who is seduced by a young female pupil (one of the three main characters) and has also come from some distant or foreign background (one almost thinks that he and Z could be one, but no, ‘tis not true). Jennifer Egan is one of those novelists who meticulously create plot, who meticulously create believable characters to carry it out, all in the service of larger literary themes which are also captured by a title as apt as Look at Me.

By the way, this is an “Advance Reading Copy” that claims it is “Not for Sale.” However, I paid twelve dollars for it at a used book store, and I wuz robbed. I can now see at least one good reason publishers do not want readers to see this sort of copy sold. It had (I always mark them) a variety of twenty-one typos, averaging more than one per chapter. And those are just the ones I caught.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Debbie Cenziper's Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America

Four Tough Brothers

3/20/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.
David Malouf
Born March 20, 1934

D. Malouf

My Book World

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Andrew H. MacAndrew and with an introductory essay by Konstantin Mochulsky. New York: Bantam, 1970.

Another book that sat on my shelf unread, this time since 1986. 936 pages. This was nineteenth-century entertainment: a book that might take readers twenty hours to read. I’m not sure twenty-first century readers believe they have twenty hours to spend on one book. Even the denouement and epilogue take up the last one hundred pages. My mental image of this book was always four brothers kicking their heels up, Cossack style, in great revelry, but, ah, no.

One of the four is said to be illegitimate, Smerdyakov. The eldest of the remaining brothers is Mitya or Dmitry. Next is Vanya or Ivan. And the youngest is Alyosha or Alexei. The Russian literary custom of assigning multiple names to a character broadens his or her dynamic, more so than the Anglo/American Bob and Robert or Jim and James. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the author uses a different name depending on the context.

No need to belabor the plot: Readers become acquainted with all four brothers. Certain conflicts arise between father and sons, particularly father and Dmitry. Father is found dead and one of the sons is accused of his murder. Like all epic novels, the author spends a great deal of leisurely time acquainting readers with each character, even the minor ones, so that one’s curiosity nearly rivals the curiosity one has in waiting to see what happens next in, say, a soap opera or an evening TV series. Only with much more gravitas. I’m certainly glad I spent the time reading this novel with a time-worn theme that surprisingly still reads fresh almost two hundred years after its writing.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipeligo

Of the Reader's Bondage

11/8/2019

Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.
Margaret Mitchell
Born November 8, 1900

M. Mitchell

My Book World

Maugham, W. Somerset. Of Human Bondage. New York: Doubleday, 1936.

“It sings, it has color. It has rapture. In viewing it one finds nothing to criticize or regret.” —Theodore Dreiser

The blurb above appears on the dust jacket edition of the novel I read. In its foreword, the author explains, in part, why he writes the novel:

“I began once more to be obsessed by the teeming memories of my past life. They came back to me so pressingly, in my sleep, on my walks, at rehearsals, at parties, they became such a burden to me, that I made up my mind there was only one way to be free of them and that was to write them all down in a book” (iv)

My central response to the novel is that, knowing Maugham divorces his wife and lives in a domestic setting with two different men, I believe the book is the perfect portrayal of a closeted homosexual or bisexual male. Like many Englishmen of his period, Philip Carey attends all-boy schools, and Maugham describes some of these young men in lustrous detail, whereas his descriptions of females are not as pointed or glowing. Carey’s relationships with women are fraught with one of two modes. The woman, such as his mother or his aunt, is motherly and nurturing or she, like two women he becomes involved with romantically, are not nurturing. In fact, one, Mildred (portrayed by Bette Davis in the 1934 film), tests the limits of credulity. Yet, when aligned with the profile of a closet homosexual (trying hard to fit into heterosexual life), may be quite accurate. Philip is convinced he loves Mildred and rejoins with her several times after she rejects him, and, except for the final fling, always takes her back no matter how cruel she has been, in one instance, wrecking his apartment and destroying all of his valuables, including paintings he has made or bought. This character knows, even if he has carnal relationships with women, he should not get married. “In Paris he had come by the opinion that marriage was a ridiculous institution of the philistines” (276). When he finishes medical school, he wants to travel, see the world. He only chooses to marry on the last page of the book, when, at last, he has matured and realizes he must settle down.

One other observation about the novel I would make is that, in contrast to how fiction writers have worked for the last fifty years, Maugham tells a great deal more than he shows. He spends many, many pages, sometimes, foreshortening a long period of time or era in Philip’s life. Of course, as a playwright, his dialog is on the mark and believable, and the characters do act out some of their emotions, but many times Maugham takes the short-cut of telling the reader how the characters feel. Yet, I do have to say that Maugham does manage to hold my attention for over five hundred pages, and that is saying a lot.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

'Passage' Remains Fresh

10/25/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one's head.
Harold Brodkey
Born October 25, 1930

H. Brodkey

My Book World

Forster, E. M. A Passage to India. New York: Houghton, 1984.

Forster accomplishes so much in this novel first published in 1924. It is one of those books that, because of the author’s elegant but subtle insights, is timeless. Readers feel as if they are there in Chandrapore experiencing the British condescension towards Indians, experiencing the many geographical and topographical wonders, observing or participating in the various religious sects, which bubble up against one another yet are a bit tolerant of one another. It is against this rich backdrop that the novel’s tension unfolds. When a young Doctor Aziz first meets Mrs. Moore, a British visitor, it is in a mosque. Before thinking, he chastises her for not having removed her shoes, but quickly apologizes when she states that she already has done so. They strike up a friendship for she is anxious to befriend the Indians, to understand their beautiful land, and Doctor Aziz is only too pleased to oblige her.

Forster also limns an Indian which is a stranger to us today, by way of Doctor Aziz. He is at by turns arrogant, defiant, then apologetic, childlike in his seeking of British approval, then ashamed, as a grown man that he has sunk so low. Since the British left India a long time ago, Indians have had time to regain or reframe their national profile while perhaps holding onto certain institutions the Brits left behind. In any case, cultures clash when Doctor Aziz, unconfident and really unwilling, is put in a position to take Mrs. Moore and her young female companion, Miss Quested, on a tour of Marabar Cave. It is a bitter irony that the expedition which he organizes explodes in his face, when something dark happens to Miss Quested in the cave, something for which Aziz is held directly responsible.

The novel’s end provides an intriguing closure, when Aziz and his hard-won British friend (who’s moved back to England) returns to Chandrapore in the future for a visit. They have become quite fond of one another yet can never seem to consummate their friendship. The last paragraphs of the novel seems to sum up their 1924 dilemma:

“‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ said the other, holding him affectionately. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’

But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart: the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and they sky said, ‘No, not there.’” (362).

NEXT WEEK: My Book World | TBD

All Traveling in the Same Direction ... Yet Not

10/11/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
There are 500 million people on Facebook*, but what are they saying to each other? Not much. [*Make that 2.3 billion. Google 10/11/19]
Elmore Leonard
Born October 11, 1925

E. Leonard

My Book World

Porter, Regina. The Travelers. New York: Hogarth, 2019.

This barely three-hundred-page novel contains a cast of thirty-five characters and spans nearly fifty years of American life from the 1970s until President Obama’s first term in office. At times, one must check back at the beginning to see who is whom. But for the most part, Porter does a remarkable job of refreshing the reader’s memory when the time comes. Even more remarkable, she paints a picture of our country as it really is: a world inhabited by white and black people who intermarry, have children, some of whom belong to the LGBTQ community. Is it all love and roses as our hippy friends of the seventies (including me) had hoped our future would be? Not by a long shot. The life she unearths is as messy as an all-white or an all-black one, but it is a life that is also marked with joys and trials of raising children, finding one’s own place in the world. This is a novel of high and low culture, one in which Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, becomes a major motif throughout the book, but a work in which current argot makes a place for itself without being annoying. It is a novel that requires the reader to put the nonlinear pieces together, a novel for now and always.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-50 Oregon

Less is Definitely More

8/23/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
The minute you make people laugh, you get them to listen.
Merrie Spaeth
Born August 23, 1948

M. Spaeth

My book World

Greer, Andrew Sean. Less: A Novel. New York: Little Brown, 2017.

While I admire a number of contemporary fiction writers, I don’t often envy one of them. This may be the book that many a gay author has wanted to write and been unable to do so, including me. It’s that good. So-called gay fiction, with this book, has joined mainstream. This novel is not a coming out story. Our culture is beyond that. Coming out is now something that every gay person must do—whether it takes years or a matter of minutes—the narratives and challenges so similar that how could one write a unique story about it? No, such fiction has advanced to a character named Arthur Less who is about to turn fifty.

Less is a self-described second-shelf writer. Nonetheless, he’s well published and in demand. When his former boyfriend of nine years announces he’s getting married (need I say to a man), Less suddenly checks his drawer for all the opportunities to lecture and teach internationally and RSVPs No to the wedding and yes to the offers. He then cobbles together a months-long tour to five or six countries.

Greer’s structure seems interesting at first. In each new locale, whether it is Mexico, Italy, Germany, or Japan, Arthur Less is thrust into a new life of sorts. At the same time, Less’s old life keeps returning to him in waves, sometimes rushing to the reader in the middle of other thoughts. Yes, suddenly you find Arthur wrestling with some momentous event out of his past. While I can certainly understand Greer’s receiving the Pulitzer Prize (funny, in one bit, Arthur makes clear how it is to be pronounced), I question this structure.

In several key spots in the novel, Greer informs readers that someone other than he is narrating the story. Who can it be? At first, the issue seems unimportant. The story unfolds in the third person, as told by this, as yet, unidentified narrator. I’m not as quick as others; I only suspected halfway through that the narrator was Freddie, the very boy whose wedding Less is avoiding. Okay, I think to myself. That’s fun. All along, Freddie is the one in the know, telling all about Arthur’s around-the-world trip in great detail, yet he has not accompanied Arthur. Oh, of course, at the end (spoiler) when the two men reunite, one assumes that Arthur will reveal all that has happened on his trip to Freddie, but that poses the question: Arthur presumably does not tell Freddie of his trip until after he returns to the U.S., so how can Freddie possibly know all that has taken place? I re-read the beginning to find the exact spot, page eleven, where Freddie begins, ostensibly, to refer to himself in the third person.

Why does Greer structure the novel in this manner? It’s clever, and, I suppose to the casual beach reader, the point of view probably doesn’t matter that much. But why doesn’t Greer just place the novel in the third person anyway or allow Freddie to narrate the novel by way of first person? Does Greer fashion it this way only to be novel, or does he have some other reason for doing so, one I cannot discern?

No matter what, I do love this book and envy it for its grand storytelling. I love Greer’s ease with the proper metaphor at the proper time, the deepening of a certain scene with the proper use of such metaphors. The blue suit. The concept that Less is a bad gay, not a bad writer. The literary allusions that don’t hit you over the head but are part of the fabric of the novel. The gray suit purchased in one country that arrives in the nick of time in another. All these combine to make not only a great read but something of a literary phenom. I now want to read all of Greer.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-46 South Dakota

A Writer's Wit

8/15/2019

I am not altogether confident of my ability to put my thoughts into words: My texts are usually better after an editor has hacked away at them, and I am used to both editing and being edited. Which is to say that I am not oversensitive in such matters.
Stieg Larsson
Born on August 15, 1954

S. Larsson

NEXT TIME: My Book World | David Sedaris, Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002

A Writer's Wit

8/13/2019

I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.
Tom Perrotta
Born August 13, 1961

T. Perrotta

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-44 Alaska

Chee Conquers His Autobiography

7/19/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Everybody has parents. As a dramatist, whenever you write a character, you must write their parents as well, even if the parents aren't there.
Mark O’Donnell
Born July 19, 1954

M. O'Donnell

My Book World

Chee, Alexander. How to Write an Autobiographical
Novel: Essays. Boston: Houghton, 2018.

This collection of essays is a staggering one. In the way that fiction writers link short stories, Chee links essays to explicate how he works as a fiction writer. His metaphors are simple yet profound. His advice is wrenched from the heart, and yet at no time does he allow sentimentality to interfere with his message. The entire collection—like a group of short stories, like a novel—possesses a narrative arc that is subtle, inching readers toward the climax, easing into a quiet denouement. The book seems nonlinear, but Chee glides readers from a few youthful months spent in Mexico becoming fluent in Spanish, to his older youth in college with Annie Dillard as a professor, to his maturation into an astute, caring professor of creative writing, to the publication of his first novel and how it explores and ultimately exposes the biggest secret of his life.

The Publishing Triangle, a long-established organization for LGBTQ writers based in New York, recently awarded this work the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. I hope, as a tour de force, it will win even more accolades in the coming months or years. Chee is a remarkable writer, and anyone who takes a seminar from him ought to feel fortunate.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-41 Nevada

Anna Burns's 'Milkman' Is Stunning Novel

7/12/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
Adam Johnson
Born July 12, 1967

A. Johnson

My Book World

Burns , Anna. Milkman. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2018.

This winner of the UK’s Man Booker Prize is a stunning read. From the outset, one is struck by this Irish writer’s Joycean style or even point of view. The novel is ostensibly set in Northern Ireland of the 1970s. Her stream-of-consciousness prose includes the practice of keeping her characters anonymous. The narrator calls herself middle sister, one of several female siblings, and refers to them as First Sister and so forth. Other characters include Milkman, the real milkman, and Somebody McSomebody. Such a practice paints a society of strict norms, in which everyone is judged by whom they associate with or don’t associate with, why one isn’t married to a particular man by a certain age. The practice keeps the reader at a distance, viewing this particular time period of strife with as much objectivity as possible. The novel might have been reduced by pages if the author had chosen real names instead of hyphenated characters like maybe-boyfriend being repeated hundreds of times, yet after establishing its own pace, the prose swoops in and snatches the reader up. At times you cannot put down the book. The narrator is her own Stephen Daedalus, striving to know her world, but also afraid to find out too much. Finding out too much might get her killed. A must read for 2019 and always.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-40 Idaho

The Two Real Lolitas

11/23/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Many writers are afraid of writing something bad, so they don't try or give up when their efforts don't lead to a masterpiece right away. If you work at it, you will improve.
Lauren Tarshis
Born November 23, 1963

My Book World

Weinman, Sarah. The Real Lolita: The
Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel
That Scandalized the World. New York:
HarperCollins, 2018.

Weinman takes two narratives—one, the actual kidnapping case of Sally Horner, in 1948, and two, author Vladimir Nabokov’s shaping of his 1950 novel, Lolita—and weaves them into a single, seamless story. About halfway through the Weinman’s book, Sally Horner is rescued by the FBI and returned to her mother. Two years later, Sally dies, at fifteen, in a car accident, and I wonder, In what direction could the author possibly now take this book?

All along, Weinman has woven the saga of how Nabokov writes Lolita with the story of Sally Horner, providing textual proof by way of his notecards and other documents that Nabokov was indeed influenced by Horner’s story. To what degree foments a debate between Nabokov and the literati that Weinman covers extensively. She also develops the idea that Nabokov has long been fascinated by the narrative of pedophiles and the children to whom they are attracted; in Lolita he finally produces the right combination of elements, one of which is the deployment of an unreliable narrator to steer the reader away from what a sinister crime he is actually participating in. Weinman skillfully stitches together these two narratives and provides a long, relaxed denouement tying up all the loose ends: relatives affected by Sally’s premature death, the imprisonment of her captor, a discussion of the abuse of young girls and women, and more.

Because of her unrelenting research and attention paid to detail, Weinman provides a satisfying read combining the genre of true crime with serious literary discussion of Nabokov’s novel. It is one of the few books I’ve read this year that I have not been able to put down once started. It’s that good.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-31 South Carolina

Thinking in Twelves

9/14/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.
Geraldine Brooks
Born September 14, 1955

G. Brooks

My Book World

Houston, Pam. Contents May Have
Shifted: A Novel. New York: Norton,
2012.

Pam H., R. Jespers, K. Dixon, 2005, Taos

I first heard Pam Houston speak in 2000 when she gave a reading for her new book, Waltzing the Cat. As she addressed a sizeable audience, and, as I met her afterward at a reception I told myself if I ever got a chance to take one of her workshops I would. I managed three: Taos, 2004 and 2005; I even journeyed to Mallorca, Spain to study with her. I didn’t do so as a groupie necessarily (though I am); it took me three different week-longers to digest her method for creating fiction—a method that resonated with me, using one’s own life and one’s own observations to create narrative.

I’ve always admired Houston’s ability to transform intensely autobiographical information into strong fiction. Some writers refuse to touch such material; others wallow in their biographies like dogs in the dust, trying but failing to rid themselves of their demon fleas. Pam has been the most influential contemporary writer, in that respect, on my thinking about writing. She taught me how to transform my autobiographical material, or perhaps she taught me to give myself permission to do so because by being that honest writers can hurt someone they love or even people they don’t. And you have to balance your honesty against how much you value the relationship, and honesty doesn’t always lose out.

Anyway . . . I feel that I was in on the inception of Contents, as well as several of its chapters because during class or at a meal, Pam would share an anecdote that eventually wound up in this novel. In 2008, at a Point Reyes bookstore, I heard her read one of the book’s short chapters-in-progress. At the time, she planned, I think, to write 144 of those chapters giving voice to the many hundreds of trips she had taken around the world, the hundreds of places she had visited in the States, the myriad human beings who had influenced her life. Why 144? “I have always, for some reason, thought in twelves” (308), Pam declares in the very last section of her book, the “Reading Group Guide.” She ends up with 132 chapters and 12 airplane stories, but still, I think she delivers on her original plan. The novel feels very global, in its fast-paced, jet-flight episodes knitted together like bones on the mend. How else could she portray a trip around the world, one which may never end as long as she lives?

Both Pam-the-person and Pam-the-author nearly lose their lives as four-year-olds when their fathers seriously abuse them, and their mothers cover up the story, amuse themselves through retelling it over cocktails, falsehoods about her pulling large pieces of furniture over on top of herself. Nearly losing their lives gives both Pams permission to push their lives to the limits because otherwise they might not be worth living. Planes that almost fall out of the sky. Boyfriends who don’t work out. Bedeviled by chronic pain since the childhood accident. . . neither Pam is comfortable unless her contents have shifted a bit since her last outing. She must be on the move, searching for that next glimmering glimpse of life, whether it is of a Tibetan monk or the life of a child whom she helping to raise. She must move.

Such a novel reflects the life that Pam lives, right? In any given year, Pam-the-author is equally at home on her ranch in Colorado, which she purchased after the phenomenal success of her first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness, equally at home on campus, equally at home teaching scores of workshops or giving readings, equally at home traveling to remote parts of the world to test her physical or emotional strength, equally at home revealing the parental abuse she was subject to as a child, lovers who have betrayed her. In this book, in particular, she manages to transform the latter three issues into a gross of clipped chapters, in which Pam-the-character (in the manner of Christopher Isherwood naming his protagonist Herr Issywoo after himself) makes herself at home on flights to Exhuma in the Bahamas, to places as obscure as Ozona, Texas. Tibet. New Zealand. Paris. Chapters named with a flight number: UA #368. Your life, as long as you are reading this book, is as discombobulated as Pam-the-character’s. You live it with her, the flashback in which Pam-the-character is hospitalized for injuries caused by her abusive father. Pam Houston—the author—gives her all to every minute that she lives, I would suspect, even when she is lying very still, devouring the pages of a new book or romping with her Irish wolfhounds through the meadowlands of her ranch. As long as she is breathing, she is inhaling the content of her next book, itself spinning inside her brain while all she seems to do is become a vessel for it, channeling the narrative burning inside her at that moment. That is what Contents May Have Shifted is about. After having been moved and enlightened by her first four books, I can now say the same for this one.

And Pam Houston’s new tome, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, comes out January 29, 2019. You’d better believe I’ve already ordered it, that I can’t wait to begin feasting on her pages once more. You see, I’m still learning from Pam.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-23 Tennessee

Handmaid's Tale: Literature of Witness

8/24/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
Jorge Luis Borges
Born August 24, 1899

J. Borges

My Book World

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale.
With a new introduction by the author.
New York: Anchor, 2017.

I suppose I always felt this book, originally published in 1986, was a woman’s book—chick lit—but after viewing the MGM/Hulu production of Atwood’s novel, I believe I was wrong. A dystopian world in which women are nothing more than baby makers and terribly devalued if they cannot deliver is not a world any of us want to live in. Such a world is also one in which all human beings are devalued, consigned to rigid gender and social roles. Atwood herself may articulate the novel’s greatest value in her new introduction:

“But there’s a literary form I haven’t mentioned yet: the literature of witness. Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an act of hope: every recorded story implies a future reader. Robinson Crusoe keeps a journal. So did Samuel Pepys, in which he chronicled the Great Fire of London. So did many who lived during the Black Death, although their accounts often stop abruptly. So did Roméo Dallaire, who chronicled both the Rwandan genocide and the world’s indifference to it. So did Anne Frank, hidden in her secret annex” (xviii).

Atwood concludes her remarks with the following statement:

“In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties proliferate. Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for women won over the past decades and indeed the past centuries. In this divisive climate, in which hate for many groups seems on the rise and scorn for democratic institutions is being expressed by extremists of all stripes, it is a certainty that someone, somewhere—many, I would guess—are writing down what is happening as they themselves are experiencing it. Or they will remember, and record later, if they can.
Will their message be suppressed and hidden? Will they be found, centuries later, in an old house, behind a wall?
Let us hope it doesn’t come to that. I trust it will not” (xix).

Indeed. A novel in which almost half of the chapters are entitled “Night”—and are alternated with ones like “Jezebel’s” and “Salvaging”—readers should be duly warned that we, too, could descend into a world of moral darkness, that we should take heed from this, our literature of witness.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-20 Florida

'Patrick Melrose': the Skeletal Remains of a Family

7/27/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Write every day. Don't kill yourself. I think a lot of people think, “I have to write a chapter a day,” and they can't. They fall behind and stop doing it. But if you just write even one hundred words a day, it's not that much. By the end of a month, you'll have three thousand words, which is one chapter.
Cassandra Clare
Born on July 27, 1973

C. Clare

My Book World

St. Aubyn, Edward. Patrick Melrose. New
York: Picador, 2015.

I more often read a novel before viewing a film version, but less often do I read the novel after tuning into something like, say, Showtime’s “five-part limited series,” of the same title. It is one of those series which may have been equal to the book, or books, because Patrick Melrose is a compendium of St. Aubyn’s five novels about the same character, and it unfolds almost as luxuriously as the book.

Patrick Melrose may be one of the best contemporary novels to come to grips with the life of a drug addict. But more important, I believe St. Aubyn traces the aspect of abuse within a family over several generations, and how, unaddressed, it can devastate a family—wealthy or not. Substance abuse is merely a symptom of the deeper problems buried in the Melrose family history.

Patrick Melrose, born in 1960, approximately the same time as his creator, experiences physical abuse when his father perpetrates sodomy on him at an early age—repeatedly over several years. But then there is also the emotional abuse, when Patrick’s father, David, swears Patrick to secrecy or he will be “very severely punished” (79). (In the film, he says he will snap him like a twig.)

Patrick’s mother? Well, her abuse of him manifests itself as ignorance—blissful, willful ignorance of how David is treating their son. She, too, has suffered abuse as a child and at the hands of her husband, and they, without even trying, do their best to destroy Patrick’s life. What is most remarkable about this novel is that St. Aubyn manages to limn the skeletal remains of the several generations of this family without any shortcuts or platitudes. On the next to the last pages of the book, Patrick has earned the profound conclusions at which he arrives:

“He imagined himself as the little boy he had been at that time, shattered and mad at heart, but with a ferocious, heroic persona, which had eventually stopped his father’s abuses with a single determined refusal. He knew that if he was going to understand the chaos that was invading him, he would have to renounce the protection of that fragile hero, just as he had to renounce the illusion of his mother’s protection by acknowledging that his parents had been collaborators as well as antagonists” (855-6).

“He was after all not an infant, but a man experiencing the chaos of infancy welling up in his conscious mind. As the compassion expanded he saw himself on equal terms with his supposed persecutors, saw his parents, who appeared to be the cause of his suffering, as unhappy children with parents who appeared to be the cause of their suffering: there was no one to blame and everyone to help, and those who appeared to deserve the most blame needed the most help” (856)

My God, in a nutshell, the entire novel portrays the unraveling of this moneyed British family, their accumulated abuses and how they lead to “drug and alcohol abuse” by Patrick, his chosen method of coping. Cause and effect, folks. Cause and effect.

I have only a couple of observations which might manifest themselves as criticisms: In spite of St. Aubyn’s lyrical and commanding prose, sustained over nearly nine hundred pages, I was often distracted. First, he participates in what American workshoppers call head-hopping, that is, employing the third-person omniscient point of view, not commonly used since the nineteenth century. Yet, I must probably applaud him because he manages to employ it with great skill, and, in a novel of this breadth, it is amusing and strategically important for the reader to know exactly what each character is thinking at any given time.

And two, the author uses, repeatedly, speech attributions which seem inappropriate or awkward. What do I mean? Any speech attribution, to my way of thinking, ought to be a synonym for the word “said,” or “spoke”: “declared,” “replied,” or similar verbs. Not so here: “The daughter is impossible,” grinned Laura (408). “Grin” is not a synonym for “said,” and it gives the sentence an amateurish patina. I wonder: Is this an acceptable practice in the writing of fiction within the United Kingdom? I should hope not. Another scathing example: “You may well ask,” scowled Nicholas (704). Seriously? How is “scowling” like “speaking?” This questionable practice is rife throughout the novel, marring what is otherwise impeccable prose, and could have been nipped in the bud by a good editor. Please help me to understand, Mr. St. Aubyn. Why would you do this to your book?

NEXT TIME: Final Installment of Defeating A Fib At Last

Strout's Endless Possibilities

7/20/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.
Franklin Foer
Born July 20, 1974

F. Foer

My Book World

Strout, Elizabeth. Anything is Possible.
New York: Random, 2017.

Strout is a master at creating simple stories that are riddled with complexities and nuance that are difficult to apprehend with one reading. You might think you’re finished reading about one character, and then he or she returns to another chapter. Charles Macauley, for example, has layer upon layer added to his part until we might think we understand him. In the meantime, we learn of others: Two sisters, one who marries well, one who does not. And a prodigal daughter/citizen, who becomes a famous author and returns to her humble beginnings to have more than a little abuse heaped upon her. But now Lucy Barton is ready to face it all.

NEXT TIME: Defeating A Fib at Last-3

Shirley Jackson's Haunted Life

4/13/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Born April 13, 1906

S. Beckett

My Book World

(Liveright)

Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather
Haunted Life. New York: Liveright,
2016.

Roger Straus, Jackson’s first publisher, often called her “a rather haunted woman” (2). She had plenty to haunt her life, especially a mother who fiercely dominated her daughter, even after she became a literary success.

“Jackson’s awareness that her mother had never loved her unconditionally—if at all—would be a source of sadness well into adulthood. Aside from a single angry letter that she did not send, she never gave voice to her feelings of rejection. But she expressed them in other ways. All the heroines of her novels are essentially motherless—if not lacking a mother entirely, then victims of loveless mothering. Many of her books include acts of matricide, either unconscious or deliberate” (25).

Jackson spends nearly the rest of her life fighting against her mother about how to raise her own children, how to cook and keep house, how to go about her career even though her mother had never had one of her own. At the same time that Shirley attempts to establish a literary career while being supportive of a husband in the related business of literary criticism and raising four children, she seems to love being with her children. She often packs them up into the car to go on day trips. She more or less lets them have free run of the house and town, while at the same time, scolds her children with the same invisible criticism that she learned from her mother.

Franklin goes into great detail about Jackson’s literary life, each novel, her famous story, “The Lottery.” She paints an honest picture of Jackson’s life, one that is so interesting, I didn’t want the book to end.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States—10 West Virginia