A WRITER'S WIT
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
Michael Ondaatje
Born September 12, 1943
A Long Way to Ireland
Photograph by Michael Marcelle
NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD
A WRITER'S WIT A Long Way to Ireland September 15, 2014, Danielle McLaughlin, “Dinosaurs on Other Planets”: Kate and Colman’s daughter Emer and grandson Oisín come home to Ireland from London to visit Emer’s parents, and bring the young woman’s current boyfriend, Pavel, a man nearly old enough to be Emer’s father. ¶ Some interesting symbolism. “Dinosaurs” by way of a sheep’s skull. Colman puts it in bleach as his grandson watches. The process forces out maggots and other insects. More symbols. Emer, the couple’s daughter, doesn’t appear to like her parents much—she’s made the trip out of a sense of duty. The only two characters who seem in any way nice are Kate and Emer’s guest, Pavel, whom Emer brings along unannounced. ¶ He’s close to being Kate’s age, and they have a brief but nearly meaningful conversation as they take a walk. Finally Emer reveals she and her six-year-old son will be moving to Australia. It seems to be indicative of the vast emotional distances that exist between most of the members of the ensemble. Well written but almost airless. I feel nothing on behalf of the characters, but I don’t think that is their fault. Photograph by Michael Marcelle NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Poor References September 1, 2014, Joseph O’Neill, “The Referees”. Thirty-six-year-old Rob Karlsson moves back to Manhattan from Portland, Oregon, after a divorce, and requires referees to let an apartment in a co-operative building. ¶ At first the focus of the story seems to be Rob’s search for two of what Americans call references. He contacts first one person then another, but most decline to help him. A friend of his former wife, for example, feels that she must remain aligned with Samantha—there’s nothing inherently wrong with him. Then Rob’s cousin offers to sign a letter if Rob will write it. And Rob finally does receive a second letter of reference from Billy—a childhood friend from whom he has been disengaged over a decade. So it would seem that there is a certain irony by way of his receiving references from parties who are now least acquainted with him. ¶ The story concludes with Rob’s own rundown of his character, basically claiming, “I’m an okay guy who won’t make trouble.” His rant continues with a short biographical sketch that further demonstrates why he is one who should be trusted to occupy a certain piece of urban property . . . even if, over most of his life, he isn’t exactly the most reliable . . . friend. I suppose one must experience this kind of dehumanization to get what O’Neill is going for here. His book, The Dog, is out in September. [The magazine gives no credit for the story’s simple illustration.] NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT My Book World O’Brien, Edna. A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O’Brien. With a foreword by Philip Roth. New York: Plume, 1984. These twenty-nine stories are the best plucked from four of O’Brien’s prior collections plus four previously unpublished stories. Yet when I read them, they all seem of a kind: all of them taking place in various decades of her native Ireland. Moreover, one hears the same bells going off in different stories, but always with a slightly different timbre. One of these ringing motifs is men who drink heavily and cause one kerfuffle or another for the women in their lives. Is it the hard edge of Irish life itself—the damp cold, the grinding poverty—that cause men to act badly, or is it a man’s will to do so? Another motif is brash women who yet still have a small fear of the Catholic church, its strictures. And yet another one is the woman hungry for the flesh of love, whether it is with a man or a woman. And yet each time O’Brien presents the reader with one of these jeweled motifs, it is fresh, not much like the bell that went off previously. The collection might be compared to a musical form: variations on a theme, in which these various themes crop up again and again until their final rendering is heard. One of my favorite stories is “Sister Imelda,” in which a teenage girl in a Catholic school falls in love with her teacher, also a nun. It is a love that is mutual, and yet her friends only think she is sucking up to the sister. No trouble arises. The turmoil between them—whether they should associate in any way but as teacher and pupil—lies just beneath the surface. And then Sister leaves the school. “I knew that there is something sad and faintly distasteful about love’s ending, particularly love that has never been fully realized. I might have hinted at that, but I doubt it. In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things” (143). In another passage, from the story, “Paradise,” a woman performs the following action ever so subtly that one almost does not recognize what is happening: “Then she knelt, and as she began he muttered between clenched teeth. He who could tame animals was defenseless in this. She applied herself to it, sucking, sucking, sucking, with all the hunger that she felt and all the simulated hunger that she liked him to think she felt” (214). In “A Scandalous Woman,” the reader learns that another character has had a certain procedure: “She had joined that small sodality of scandalous women who had conceived children without securing fathers and who were damned in body and soul. Had they convened they would have been a band of seven or eight, and might have sent up an unholy wail to their Maker and their covert seducers” (252). Though all these stories were written more than thirty years ago, they still are fresh. The language. The situations. The conclusions. All fresh. O’Brien’s brogue is always something you feel as well as hear: sweet and rough, like chocolate candy with nuts.
NEXT TIME: PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY OF A PARADE IN RENO A WRITER'S WIT Fragility of Childhood August 25, 2014, Tessa Hadley, “One Saturday Morning”: Ten-year-old Carrie of 1960s London is mesmerized by and also a bit frightened by a family friend, who shows up at their door while her parents are out shopping. ¶ The circumstances lead the more lascivious reader to suspect that Dom, the visitor, has some evil purpose in mind, primarily because Carrie innocently lets him into the house when, for now, she is all alone. ¶ It turns out that Dom has recently lost his wife. This is the reason why he’s so goofy: playing her Bartók piece on the piano, as she skulks around upstairs, bearishly embracing her mother on a balcony below Carrie’s room, his grief overwhelming her mother’s presence with something that resembles dancing. ¶ As often happens in life, a child doesn’t understand until years later the evanescence of that moment: Already, Carrie hardly knew if she’d actually seen Dom dancing on the balcony with her mother, or if that had happened only her imagination, a vision of what consolation might be—something headlong and reckless and sweet, unavailable to children.” Hadley’s Married Love: And Other Stories was published in 2012.
Joss McKinley, Photographer NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT My Book World Williams, John. Stoner. With an introduction by John McGahern. New York: New York Review Books, 1965. My aunt, who lives in the Netherlands, recommended this book to me almost a year ago. Evidently, years after its release, the book has become a great success in Europe by way of various translations. I bought the Kindle version, figuring I would read it in airports during my travels but actually didn’t get around to it until now. Stoner is a difficult book to read at times, not because of the prose or the structure. No, the words flow in a sort of drudge-like way, like the protagonist’s life as an academician at the University of Missouri in the early part of the twentieth century. I’ve never read a novel that so flawlessly used a spare amount of dialogue. Instead, Williams reveals much by way of interior monologue or narrative description. He pens entire decades in the stroke of one sentence, and yet the act seems natural. We were there; now we’re here. The novel is also difficult because there are a number of emotionally grueling scenes or sections. William Stoner is born to Missouri farmers in 1890—about the age of my late grandparents. At eighteen he is mildly encouraged by his parents to attend the University of Missouri in agricultural studies. The idea is that he will return to the farm one day. Instead, however, he is drawn into the world of literature by a rather cynical professor, and after his first two years Stoner changes his major to English. He does so without informing his parents, and when graduation nears, Stoner’s professor sees that he is awarded some money to pursue his master’s degree and then a PhD. Then in sort of a fluke, he applies for and receives a position on the faculty at MU. Williams, perhaps more than any writer I’ve ever read, reveals what it is like to teach university level students. Any number of novels take place in the university setting, but Williams actually takes the reader into the life of a professor: the books he teaches, his classroom, his office as he advises. We see him as he grows, becomes more confident in his field. Williams, like Stoner, enjoys teaching, loves it in fact. “His job gave him a particular kind of identity, and made him what he was . . . It’s the love of the thing that’s essential. And if you love something, you’re going to understand it. you’ve got to keep the faith.” Stoner is stubborn and adheres to his opinion, no matter what it may be—whether he flunks a student or prevents a PhD candidate from advancing because he believes the young man will be a menace to the classroom. In this slim novel we see William Stoner move from age eighteen through his reluctant retirement at age sixty-five. In between, we see him shut out of his own family by a neurotic wife, so that beyond a certain point, he doesn’t even become acquainted with his own daughter. He falls in love with a woman in the department and carries on an affair with her until they are found out. Because of departmental politics, he is demoted to teaching nothing but freshman classes, which is a blow not only to him but the graduate students who have depended on him for his wisdom and guidance. Stoner’s end is equally gripping, and the reader should be prepared for it. I was not. And yet Stoner is; he always has been prepared. “He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to the death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living” (41). Stoner is a brief but significant read, well worth the time, whether you’re an academic or not. It’s as arduous as any war novel. It may be the best portrayal of the war that can rage on between the sharpest minds found at any university English department. Black Witch Moth Found on our patio door the evening of August 18. Two shots of same moth. Located mostly in desert Southwest and other arid or semiarid regions. Whee!
NEXT TIME: PHOTOS OF RENO/LAKE TAHOE AREA A WRITER'S WIT My Book World Pasternak, Boris. Dr. Zhivago. New York: Signet, 1958. As a high school youth I saw the film Dr. Zhivago at least twice. Then when I went to college I was required to view it for a humanities class, whose theme for the semester was “creativity.” Among other titles we also read Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art?. The book cost a dollar. One evening early in the semester the entire college, who was required to take humanities, showed up at the local theater to view Dr. Zhivago; the venue was capable of holding all 700 of us. Even out of the three showings all my tender mind could derive from the three-hour film was that Dr. Zhivago simply wished to live his life, free of political wranglings. He had no thoughts of being rich; he merely wanted to live his life creatively—mainly through writing poetry. Through the years I’ve continued to revisit the film, and, as an older man, derive different gifts from it. Back when I was in college I was not required to read the novel but bought a Signet paperback version (the cover says) for ninety-five cents. I estimate that Dr. Zhivago, the novel, moved with me at least a dozen times from Winfield, Kansas to Dallas to Lubbock, Texas, each time packed up in a box and then placed in its alphabetical niche on various shelves. But only recently did I find the time to pull the yellow-paged copy off the shelf and read it—close to fifty years after I bought it. I’ve not been disappointed in Pasternak’s novel first published in Italy in 1955. It caused a furor both in Russia, where it was officially denounced, and in the Western world, where it was heralded as a realistic account of Tsarist Russia’s shift to communism. The plot, of course, is only too familiar. Dr. Yuri Zhivago comes from a rather well to do family, and he receives his education with grace and anticipation of living a charmed life. He marries Tonia, and they have a son. At some point he works with Lara, a nurse, and though he is attracted to her, he does not admit it. Years later they are reunited by working in the same hospital, and they fall in love. Zhivago is then swept up in Russian history as he is captured by the partisans, who conscript him as a medical officer. He “serves” with them for a long period, and he never again sees Tonia or his son, Sasha, who have moved to Paris. As an older man he marries and fathers two children, but this part is left out of the film. Unlike the film, which seems to conclude with Yuri’s heart attack on the street, the book ends with a detailed account of the life of Tania, the love child of Yuri and Lara. The film devises a frame by which Zhivago’s brother searches out Tania and the entire book seems to be told as one flashback. The following passages are but two that indicate how Pasternak seeks to portray the savagery of the war. “Zhivago had told him how hard he found it to accept the ruthless logic of mutual extermination, to get used to the sight of the wounded, especially to the horror of certain wounds of a new sort, to the mutilation of survivors whom the technique of modern fighting had turned into lumps of disfigured flesh” (99). I’m glad finally to have read Pasternak’s novel. His words continue to reach out to us, imploring us, worldwide, to find diplomatic solutions to human conflict. War does nothing but separate people, obliterate their lives into something that is forever after incomprehensible. War serves to separate those who might love one another and raise children in relative peace, and that ought to be the least people can expect out of life.
A WRITER'S WIT The Dangers of Owning a Picasso August 11 & 18, 2014, César Aira, “Picasso”: A man encounters a genie while visiting the Picasso Museum and is offered a choice: would he rather own a Picasso or become Picasso himself? ¶ The narrator explores the ramifications of both positions. If he chooses to be Picasso, he is presented with a particular set of problems. If he elects to have a Picasso, he is presented with another set. Perhaps Aira wishes for the reader to wonder about the meaning of art. What is its value for the artist? The individual viewing it? After subconsciously wishing for a Picasso, the narrator is granted his wish. Now what? Aira’s The Musical Brain and Other Stories will be released in 2015. Hand lettering by Joel Holland NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Youthful Hazards
doesn’t fare so well now, as a rather large men enters the apartment. During Paige’s brief absence an incident occurs, and Albert exits in a hurry, leaving his father’s shoes behind. Instead of punishing his son, Albert’s father, who is normally quite strict, senses something has happened, something profound, something he cannot change on behalf of his son. Theroux’s collection, Mr. Bones, is out this fall.
Edel Rodriguez, Illustrator NEXT POST: AUGUST 11. PLEASE PERUSE ARCHIVES LISTED BY MONTH. STATS SHOW I HAD 3,000+ READERS FOR THE MONTH OF JULY. THANKS! A WRITER'S WIT The Most Difficult Meal
“When I was a child, she would screech and recoil anytime my finger approached the vicinity of my nose” (66). The narrator is at a painful point: wanting to care for the only person who may have cared for him, and, yet hoping to move on with his own life. And again, most of us have been there or will be at some point, and his story is an insightful reminder that we will also become the one who requires care. The author’s collection of stories, Brief Encounters with the Enemy, came out in 2013.
Lettering by Marion Deuchars Photograph by James Ross A WRITER'S WIT My Book World Harrison, Jim. Dalva. New York: Washington Square, 1988. Dalva is named by her parents after a Portuguese song, “Estrella Dalva,” or “Morning Star.” It may suit Dalva throughout her life for she always seems to be up early enough to witness such thing. She's always active, on the move in her universe. ¶ While still a teenager, Dalva falls in love with a half-Sioux man and makes love to him. When she becomes pregnant, she is sent off to have the baby and put it up for adoption. Dalva will never marry, and she will never have another child. She begins a rather circuitous journey to find out where her son is. She doesn’t necessarily wish to meet him or become part of his life; she merely hopes to find out how his life has turned out. ¶ Interwoven throughout this search is the buried story of her great great grandfather, by way of his journals, that a young scholar, Michael, examines for his research. But always the thrust of the narrative is Dalva in search of her son. The tragic story of the Sioux serves to inform Dalva of the wildness, perhaps, of her half-Sioux lover, the foretelling of what her son might be like, when she finally does meet up with him. And ironically, (thanks to artful writing) the meeting with her son comes near the end of the book. And it is brief. The book has been all about the journey. What happens to those two is now anyone’s guess. It could even become another story, for another time, and in fact, does with Harrison's novel, The Road Home, published in 1998. Dalva, in the long run, may become known more for its fair and stark retelling of the American West: how the original homeowners were duped out of their land forever. NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014 A WRITER'S WIT Maybe Drugs Are the Answer
years earlier. How are they different from the last group of young uns to go through this? May be the sheer magnitude, the sheer panoply of drugs and substances that are so readily available to them and how they so easily ingest great amounts of these substances and still rise the next day to do anything more than pee! It’s a miracle! “First we did molly, lay on the thick carpet touching it, ourselves, one another. We did edibles, bathed dumbly in the sun, took naps on suède couches. Later, we did blow off the keys to ecologically responsible cars. We powdered glass tables and bathroom fixtures. We ate mushrooms—ate and waited, ate and waited . . . we smoked cigarettes and joints, sucked on lozenges lacquered in hash oil. We tried one another’s benzos and antivirals, Restoril, Avodart, YAZ, and Dexedrine, looking for contraindications.” And yet there may be a cynical self-awareness among these characters that the previous generation didn’t possess. When the narrator’s girl friend (though she clinically explains why they should not have sex) exclaims, high or mellow on mushrooms, “It’s like . . . it was all choreographed for me,” while viewing the hush of a desert sunset, the narrator replies, “‘But that’s what it is,’ I said, ‘That’s what being on drugs is.”
With the last sentence, you realize, perhaps, the entire story has been choreographed precisely so he can say that. And yet the story is plump with realizations—epiphanies, dare I say—that just might not have surfaced without the use of drugs. Either way, whether the writer himself is stoned while writing the story or not, he certainly makes one feel that he could be! It makes you wish your own life could be transformed so easily. Jackson graduated from Harvard and UVA and is working on a collection of stories entitled Prodigals. He is, I believe, a writer to watch. Be sure and check out the magazine’s interview with him. Grant Cornett, Photographer NEXT TIME: (HOPEFULLY) MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Weatherall Meets Columbus? July 7 & 14, 2014, Allegra Goodman, “Apple Cake”: Jeanne, a seventy-four-year-old woman, is dying of lung cancer, and her entire family drop in to pay respects before she actually departs. ¶ I’ve read few short stories in which the author employs the third person omniscient point of view; such is usually reserved for the large scope of a novel. But here Goodman uses it effectively to depict Jeanne’s family. We float in and out of her consciousness, as we wonder if she just might hold on. We trail out of Jeanne’s room or house to see and hear what Jeanne’s older sisters are saying and doing. Her two sons, as well. Why is it, Goodman seems to be saying, that at the end of life, a once energetic and talented musician and teacher becomes something less than human? A burden. A problem to dispose of. And perhaps she addresses this question. So close to death, Jeanne is far removed from the playing of her violin, though it is just out of reach. She doesn’t wish to be buried next to her husband of thirty-eight years. Is she crazy? Is the story a bit “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” meets Good-bye, Columbus? Goodman published Intuition in 2006. [The magazine gives no credit for the story’s illustration.] NEXT TIME: RECENT CANYON PHOTOS A WRITER'S WIT Another Great Curtis Story June 30, 2014, Rebecca Curtis, “The Pink House”: A young woman, a writer, gathers a number of other failed writers to a place on the Mexican border to share a tale of how she ruined a man’s life. ¶ At first you wonder why Curtis must relate this story as she does—with all these writers to filter it through—but it is a clever manner in which to get a broader take on it. ¶ The story provides a fascinating character study: the young woman is uncontrollably candid about everything, her bleak upbringing by cold and uncaring parents, the black men she’s attracted to, how pinkish white men repulse her, how, in spite of this revulsion, she stays with one (a competent writer), who helps edit her work so that it gets published. ¶ Curtis is successful in relating what is essentially a ghost story that, enhanced by the reader's suspension of disbelief, feels as if it could have happened! Curtis's "The Christmas Miracle" was the magazine's last story of 2013 (a great read), and her latest book is Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money. Jon Gray, Illustrator NEXT TIME: PHOTOGRAPHS A WRITER'S WIT My Book World Ackerley, J. R. My Father and Myself. With an introduction by W. H. Auden. New York: New York Review Books, 1969. A few months ago, I profiled in my blog Ackerley’s novel, We Think the World of You, should you wish to see my rationale for reading this man in the first place. My Father and Myself is a memoir published posthumously. In its pages Ackerley outlines his suspicions about his father’s life before marrying his mother. He begins by examining some photographs that document his father’s friendship with a number of other handsome young men back at the turn of the twentieth century. As one who embraces his homosexuality (with hundreds of partners over several decades), Ackerley sets about to see if he can discover if his father wasn’t also gay. What makes him suspect? Well, for one, unlike many British men, his father seems not to possess the usual homophobia but rather indicates to Ackerley that he has the freedom to pursue whatever life he wishes. And Ackerley feels compelled to take his father’s advice: “I was now on the sexual map and proud of my place on it. I did not care for the word ‘homosexual’ or any label, but I stood among the men, not among the women. Girls I despised; vain, silly creatures, how could their smooth soft, bulbous bodies compare in attraction with the muscular beauty of men? Their place was the harem, from which they should never have been released; true love, equal and understanding love, occurred only between men. I saw myself therefore in the tradition of the Classic Greeks, surrounded and supported by all the famous homosexuals of history—one soon sorted them out—and in time I became something of a publicist for the rights of that love that dare not speak its name” (154-5). His understanding of his condition seems to belong to its largely misogynist historic period, eh? But he is indeed living his life with a certain guilt-free abandon that was not to be widely duplicated until the 1970s. He also confesses to throwing aside certain individuals in search of his ignis fatuus. Yes, always, he’s in search of his Ideal Friend, a perfect lover, one he never finds.
The climax of the memoir may occur when Ackerley tells of searching out one of his father’s old buddies, one who is now near death. After heckling the elderly man with the question of whether his father may have liked men, he finally shouts at Ackerley, “Oh, lord, you’ll be the death of me! I think he did once say he’d had some sport with him [Count de Gallatin]. But me memory’s like a saucer with the bottom out” (262). But Ackerley is still unsure. “May have” simply isn’t enough proof for him. The book is complete with an Appendix that dares to speak its name more graphically about Ackerley’s sexual difficulties. In all, the memoir is one of those fascinating books one should read: witty, devilish, and yet sad, too. Though Ackerley acts “freely” for his context, a dangerously homophobic England, he never quite achieves an approximation of happiness. One hopes that gay men never again have to live in such gloom anywhere on this earth. It simply isn’t fair. NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014 A WRITER'S WIT Rising Once Again June 23, 2014, Maile Meloy, “Madame Lazarus”: A Parisian man gives his male lover, the nameless narrator, a small dog, which he does not really want. ¶ Yet Cordelia, the dog, keeps the nameless narrator, an old man, company when his young lover is out of town. A fine narrative seems capable of juggling several important events, some in the past bouncing in interesting ways off those closer to the present. Meloy’s story accomplishes this (not so) simple task beautifully. ¶ As a young boy, the narrator falls for another boy, who is tortured by the Germans during World War II. They meet again after the war, and the lover, now with tuberculosis, dies on the narrator’s parents’ dining room floor. This seminal event—witnessing the death of a young love—continues to resonate throughout the narrator's life. ¶ Cordelia ages, as dogs do, and one day dies on a Parisian pavement. The nameless narrator attempts to revive the dog, as he had wished to revive his lover on that dining room floor. Meloy’s ending is satisfying because she takes an old, old conceit and makes it her own. A being can sometimes rise from the dead, but, in the end what does such a miracle really mean? ¶ Meloy’s The Apothecary came out in 2011. Adam Stennett, Illustrator NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER’S WIT My Book World Robertson, Nan. The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and The New York Times. Lincoln NE: iUniverse, 1992, 2000. Much of my nonfiction reading is informed by C-SPAN’s weekend Book TV, and most of what catches my eye are recent releases. However, on May 24 I watched an early 1990s interview with the late Nan Robertson, New York Times reporter and author of The Girls in the Balcony. I was so taken with her wit, her analysis of what had happened to her and other female reporters during her long tenure at the newspaper that it spurred me to buy a copy of her book—which is now published as a reprint by the Author’s Guild. It chronicles the turbulent history that women reporters had with the Times, and she begins with the setting for the title. “The Board Room at the pinnacle of the New York Times Building is calculated to awe. It is a huge room, with a baronial fireplace sheathed in green marble at the far end. Set against carved mahogany paneling that reaches from floor to ceiling” (3). Robertson goes on for a page and a half, describing the “baronial” room and the fact that until mid-twentieth-century, female employees cannot enter it except by way of the balcony, where, in reality, they are relegated to a near-elevator-sized space with no chairs. Unless situated correctly, the women cannot hear the proceedings, cannot participate in making the decisions about what is to be published and what isn’t. This situation is merely a symbol for their total inequality, which includes their salaries. Their research shows that the average woman is underpaid by at least $3,000 a year. Finally, in 1972, six women put their careers on the line and write a letter to the publisher concerning this issue, and fifty women sign it. Two months later, the publisher meets with the six women. One of them, Betsy Wade, chief copy editor of the foreign desk, speaks on their behalf: “It’s all there,” Betsy said. “All of us are afraid in our pocketbooks. It hurts you over your lifetime earnings, it hurts you in your pension, it hurts every way. And of course, the individual woman can do little to remedy this. She goes to her boss or to her manager and she says, ‘Look, I’m turning the same turret lathe as the guy sitting here and I’m making less.’ And he says, ‘Well you just don’t turn the turret lathe quite so well’” (13). The publisher must realize that if he is to rectify these discrepancies across the board it will cost the Times about $2 million dollars a year, and from his inaction, it is clear he doesn’t plan to help out. The women then go to court in 1974. In the long run, the women and the newspaper decide to settle, because to carry forward with a suit would ruin the paper (and the women’s careers). But what money the women receive is only a fraction of what they've earned. What is most notable about Robertson’s book—aside from her fine prose style, her impeccable choice of detail—is that she carefully delineates the battle these brave women fight on behalf of women reporters everywhere, including those who presently work for the Times. So often, the young (of any generation) take for granted their freedoms, as if they’ve always been present . . . and always will be. We must be reminded that women still make seventy-seven cents for every dollar a man makes, and what better way to remind us than Robertson's book.
NEXT TIME: PHOTOGRAPHS A WRITER'S WIT Spirit Life in the Mojave June 9 & 16, 2014, Karen Russell, “The Bad Graft”: Two young people, Angie and Andy, leave Pennsylvania to travel through Joshua Tree National Park in California’s Mojave Desert. ¶ Angie’s body is overtaken by a Joshua tree, and she seems to take on its life. “During a season of wild ferment, a kind of atmospheric accident can occur: the extraordinary moisture stored in the mind of a passing animal or hiker can compel the spirit of a Joshua to Leap through its own membranes. The change is metaphysical: the tree’s spirit is absorbed into the migrating consciousness, where it lives on, intertwined with its host” (95). Using an omniscient third-person point of view, the author Russell weaves the reader in and out of the consciousness of one character to another, including the Joshua tree. Wow. Russell seems to be exploring rumors (news?) that the Joshua tree is headed for extinction. A park ranger has different ideas: “‘Oh, it’s a hardy species,’ the ranger says. His whiskers are clear tubes that hold the red firelight. ‘Those roots go deep. I wouldn’t count a tree like that out’” (101). I believe this may be one of the top New Yorker stories of the year, if for nothing else, the sheer joy of its imaginative nature. The next leap for us, as a species, might be to aid in preserving all the Joshua trees of the world. Russell’s novel, Swamplandia! was released in 2011.
Michael Marcelle, Photographer NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Yesterday is Tomorrow June 9 & 16, 2014, Haruki Murakami, “Yesterday”: Tanimura narrates the story about his friend Kitaru, when they are both twenty. ¶ Tanimura is perplexed by Kitaru, who takes the Beatles song “Yesterday” and sets it to what he refers to as a crude Japanese dialect: Kansai. An odd character, Kitaru asks Tanimura to go out with his girl, Erika, someone he has known since childhood. They do and have a great time but never go out again. Shortly after, Kitaru leaves the coffee shop where both friends have been working. So does Tanimura. ¶ Sixteen years later Tanimura runs into Erika. She says that Kitaru has moved to Denver to be a chef. They chat. ¶ Odd story—without the usual arc. A little dull. The kind of story that ordinary people in real life tell each other while chatting during a chance meeting. Oh. Murakami’s three-volume novel 1Q84 came out in 2009-10. Michael Marcelle, Photograph NEXT TIME: MORE SUMMER FICTION A WRITER'S WIT Can You Find a Story? June 9 & 16, 2014, Ramona Ausubel, “You Can Find Love Now”: Cyclops develops an online persona in order to attract (lure) young women into his underground lair. ¶ Cyberspace meets Cyclops of Greek mythology. Ha ha. Funny. Clever. Sad. Poignant. End of story. ¶ My problem, I fear. I have an aversion to stories paralleled a little too closely to mythology. Slight references or allusions, yes, but adapting an entire story around a musty, old character! Blechh. Ausubel’s story collection, A Guide to Being Born, is out now. Michael Marcelle, Photographer NEXT TIME: MORE SUMMER FICTION A WRITER'S WIT Each summer, the New Yorker publishes a two-week issue of fiction, typically with six or eight short stories. One can imagine toting this issue to the beach or to the mountains and soaking in each story over a long weekend or even during one's vacation. In the past, the issue has often been the launch pad for new or young authors. This year the issue is entitled "Summer Fiction: Love Stories." . . . of a Man Named Brady June 9 & 16, 2014, David Gilbert, “Here’s the Story”: In 1967, Ted Martin and Emma Brady, of Los Angeles, married to other people, each with three children, are en route to the east coast via TWA. ¶ The couple have become acquainted earlier, when Ted has wandered from a boring baseball game to a city park, where Emma and her youngest son are on an outing among the “hippies.” The couple have actually met earlier by way of their children attending the same school. ¶ On the plane, Ted exchanges seats with a woman, so that he may sit with Emma. On what must be upward to four hours, they become much better acquainted, so much so that they hold hands on the plane’s final approach to Cincinnati. What happens next is totally unexpected . . . and yet Gilbert informs the reader in the first sentence what is about to transpire: “It ends with his right hand gripping her left, the curve of her knuckles the pulling yoke” (46). If the reader recognizes the names of their six children--Greg, Peter, and Bobby, and Marcia, Jan, and Cindy--there’s a good reason for it. Gilbert’s novel, & Sons, was released in 2012. Michael Marcelle, Photographer NEXT TIME: MORE SUMMER FICTION A WRITER'S WIT Ba Ba Ba Boom! June 2, 2014, Thomas Pierce, “Ba Baboon”: Brooks, a forty-four-year-old brain injury patient, and his sister Mary break into the house of Wynn, her married boyfriend’s place, to locate sex tapes that Wynn has made of Mary. ¶ Because of Brooks’s brain injury some of the story seems to be told from his stream-of-consciousness point of view, although the author hands Mary the POV in alternating sections to tell about things Brooks might not remember. In any case, they’re hiding from, then running from, Wynn’s guard dogs. After an encounter in which Brooks is bitten by one of the dogs, he learns from a figure hiding under the covers the secret words, Ba Baboon, that will cause the dogs to become docile. ¶ The story begins in a satisfying manner with a proper complication, but somehow the narrative gets lost in the home somewhere, meanders to a point that leaves one wondering what the story is about. An account of brain injuries? What to do when one’s boyfriend makes a secret sex tape of you and you wish to recover the evidence? How to handle vicious dogs? The relationship between the two characters does not seem wholly developed. Pierce’s House of Small Mammals will be out in January. Leslie Herman, Illustrator A WRITER'S WIT A Lifetime Friendship May 26, 2014, Alejandro Zambra, “Camilo”: Two men and their sons meet and form relationships with each other over a life time. ¶ I love this kind of story, one that moves back and forth lazily through time and across various spaces—as if the various parts represent one journey. Zambra’s story is sophisticated—revealing little bits of information at a time, each piece of the puzzle falling into place until the very end, when they all make sense. Harder to accomplish than one might think! Zambra has achieved acclaim for his novel, Bonsai. John Brownjohn, Design New is Old Again May 19, 2014, Robert Coover, “The Waitress”: A woman working at a diner is granted three wishes by an old bag lady who “turns out to be a fairy godmother in disguise.” ¶ An odd little story, a fairy tale, with few, if any, revisions over the old ones. This is the second of Coover's fairy tales that the magazine has published recently. Why? one wonders. To show that we’re still children? That we still enjoy experiencing a certain suspension of disbelief? That we, too, wouldn’t mind receiving three wishes, by which we would make fools of ourselves? The Brunist Day of Wrath, a novel, is Coover's most recent novel. Melinda Beck, Illustrator NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD
A WRITER'S WIT Still Fleeing May 12, 2014, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, “The Fugitive”: Boris, a Soviet dissident, to avoid arrest, flees Moscow to live in the countryside. ¶ Boris’s crime is that he is an artist who expresses bitter political satire through his work. He begins his exile in the winter by spending it with Nura, an old woman who only wishes to receive vodka as pay. Boris passes the long winter by drawing on rolls of old wallpaper. They are later sold to help Boris earn income. He evades arrest until 1976, four years after leaving Moscow. ¶ More and more post-Soviet literature may now find its way into the world. This story seems so timeless because it reads like a “tale,” the fictional narrative of what may have been real events. And like the Holocaust, there is no way authors can write too much about the over seventy years of suffering the Russian people experienced. Their narratives contribute to a tapestry of human history. The author’s novel, The Funeral Party, was published in 2002. Riccardo Vecchio, Illustrator I WON'T POST AGAIN UNTIL MAY 20 OR 21. SEE "ARCHIVES" IN SIDEBAR ABOVE TO CATCH UP WITH PREVIOUS POSTS. A WRITER'S WIT My Book World Ballard, J. G. Empire of the Sun. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984, 2007. The author, born in Shanghai, China, in 1930, explains in the Foreword that this novel is based on his experiences during World War Two, during which he was interned from 1942 to 1945, in his early teens. Indeed, the main character Jim is separated from his parents. The 1987 film by Steven Spielberg makes a big to-do of their separation, but in the book it seems to happen as it might happen to a child. One moment his parents are present, as he is knocked down in a certain melee. The next moment his mother is gone: “Jim’s mother had disappeared, cut off from him by the column of military trucks” (32). Then his father lies down with him, but mysteriously, the next day Jim finds himself alone in a hospital, hoping his parents will come for him soon. This bright boy must now negotiate the muddy and treacherous waters of wartime virtually on his own. I was inspired by a recent viewing of the film to read the book. I recall many of the movie’s scenes as they unfold on the pages. However, Spielberg takes some liberties, as film directors are wont to do, in order to tell his story. The novel is multi-layered, with countless poignant and sad scenes, but Spielberg turns it into a boy’s adventure story. Both are great, but they are not equally great works. In the beginning, the eleven-year-old Jim, intelligent though he is, possesses childish and feckless notions: “He thought of telling Mr. Maxted that not only had he left the cubs and become an atheist, but he might become a Communist as well. The Communists had an intriguing ability to unsettle everyone, a talent Jim greatly respected” (15). And like a child he tends to think about things with a limited point of view: “Jim had little idea of his own future—life in Shanghai was lived wholly within an intense present—but he imagined himself growing up to be like Mr. Maxted” (16). Early on Jim grasps what death is all about, yet also a certain irony he may not fully understand until later: “In many ways the skeletons were more live than the peasant farmers who had briefly tenanted their bones. Jim felt his cheeks and jaw, trying to imagine his own skeleton in the sun, lying here in this peaceful field within sight of the deserted aerodrome” (17). As a child might, Jim feels he is responsible for things that are not really his fault, again, largely because he lacks the full picture that an adult would see. The novel, like a children’s story, moves from one episode to the next, one scene to the next. I found it hard to follow at first. But then I realized that perhaps Ballard wishes for the reader to experience this daze that Jim is in, the chaotically episodic nature of his life over a period of several years, as he struggles to stay alive. Even though he periodically wonders where his parents are, even wonders what they look like, his main focus is on staying alive. His body suffers malnutrition. He develops pus-laden gums. In my Kindle I highlighted the word sun, sunlight, and many synonyms for the word. Ballard seems to be saying two things. One, the Japanese empire, whose symbol seems to be that big red sun on its flag, is stretching its domain to include China. The sun also seems to symbolize a brighter day for Jim and the thousands of other refugees of their war. Ballard’s use of it is never heavy-handed; the “sun” just seems to appear as a natural part of this war-torn world. I’ve read other war (anti-war) novels: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Heller’s Catch-22, and others. This novel captures yet a different war, part of the Pacific theater, but it is seen through the eyes of a boy, who at times perceives things poorly because he is a child, and at the same time grasps what’s happening precisely because his innocence allows him to see the truth. And his point of view often allows him to sidestep the callous or evil actions or adults, even those who profess to be looking out for him. Ballard seems to cast little judgment over this war. It is only where this young man is trapped, alive, yet half dead. Ballard’s last paragraph works as a précis of his entire novel: “Below the bows of the Arrawa a child’s coffin moved onto the night stream. Its paper flowers were shaken loose by the wash of a landing craft carrying sailors from the American cruiser. The flowers formed a wavering garland around the coffin as it began its long journey to the estuary of the Yangtze, only to be swept back by the incoming tide among the quays and mud flats, driven once again to the shores of this terrible city” (279). Jim and his parents are reunited very quietly (unlike the film). Though they return to England, others are not so fortunate. Many, like the child's coffin, are swept back to Shanghai.
NEXT TIME: MORE SHOTS OF BACKYARD BIRDS A WRITER'S WIT Naturally May 5, 2014, Sam Lipsyte, “The Naturals”: Caperton (great name) flies from Chicago to Newark to be with his dying father, and during his flight back to Chicago his father . . . dies. ¶ Lipsyte packs so much into what seems like a simple narrative about a grown man unable to accept his father’s impending death. On the plane to and from Newark, Caperton meets the Rough Beast—a professional wrestler who acts as sort of a surrogate father, though he may be younger than Caperton—one of those literary coincidences that must happen in a narrative though it rarely does in life. His stepmother Stell has a “deal” with her fridge, mainly that she wants no one rooting around in there except her. She and Caperton have a major argument over his intrusion, and he winds up crushing a tomato against his bare chest—making his years of cumulative rage palpable. ¶ Every character in this tale is a “storyteller,” particularly Burt, Caperton’s father’s best buddy, who now tells stories to children at the library to occupy his old-man time. Lipsyte has created the ultimate story for any man with a dying father. There’s always a story, a narrative between those two men, and it is, in many case, a sad one—just is, that’s all. Lipsyte’s latest book, The Fun Parts: Stories, was out in 2013. [The magazine gives no credit for the story’s illustration.] NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD |
AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
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