Category:

Of the Reader's Bondage

11/8/2019

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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

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Leave-of-Absence

1/26/2019

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Because I am needed to care for a loved one following his surgery, I am suspending my blog activity, hopefully for no more than several months. Also, I MUST finish writing a book I've been working on for over three years. When I've achieved those two things, I'll return to posting three or four times a week. Until then, please feel free to browse through my archives located to the far right. Below you can find links to a few of my favorite posts from the past year. RJ

Sally Field's Memoir Is Powerful
The Two Real Lolitas
Turning Seventy, Yikes!
Bullets to Bells: A Powerful Collection of Poems
Thinking in Twelves
A Handmaid's Tale: Literature of Witness
Defeating A Fib At Last-1
Russian Roulette Is a Hot Read
Life Among the Savages Still Delightful
Shirley Jackson's Haunted Life
Barcelona Photographs

Thanks for stopping by . . . until we meet again, keep reading!

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The Two Real Lolitas

11/23/2018

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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

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How Editors Work

11/9/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
Thinking it was easy to take a chance on things if you had nothing to lose—politics, ideas, almost anything in fact; from the bottom of the ladder you could safely risk a fall, but the higher that you climbed the more cautious you must be.
Martin Flavin
Born November 2, 1883

M. Flavin

My Book World

Ginna, Peter, ed. What Editors Do: The Art,
Craft, and Business of Book Editing.
Chicago: U of Chicago, 2017.

Ginna has amassed a large number of essays by editors and agents, or those who used to be one or the other. He organizes their pieces around broad topics such as acquisition, editing process, and publication. But he also includes a section concerning memoir and one about careers in publishing. Writers have heard ad infinitum what editors want when they attend workshops, but somehow, when one is suddenly on the other side of the desk peering through the eyes of those editors one begins to understand. One begins to change how one might structure one’s book or write a book proposal. One suddenly sees what is important. One sees what editors do not want to see. I found three essays to be particularly helpful to me, but I imagine that each reader of this book may find others more attractive precisely because they have different priorities than I do.

1. “The Other Side of the Desk: What I learned about Editing
   When I Became a Literary Agent,” by Susan Rabiner.

“It’s the value added by the author to what is essentially a set of facts, stories, and commentary in search of a larger meaning. To conceptualize is to link these facts, stories, and commentary to a compelling point. A successful book proposal offers to take the reader on a journey. It may be one he has taken, in some form, many times before. An author’s concept for the book is her promise [is] that with the benefit of new research, new stories, new insights, and her authorial guiding vision, the reader will see new things on the journey and arrive at a new destination—and even, at the end, be changed by the experience” (77).

2. “The Half-Open Door: Independent Publishing and
   Community,” by Jeff Shotts.

“There is now, as a result, a vast commercial enterprise around book publishing, where annual profits are valued above cultural currency, books are spoken of in terms of ‘units,’ and readers are sorted by algorithm into categories by which they can be told with increasing accuracy just what it is they want. Commercial values have conflated quantity with quality, and commercial publishers are forced to create the appearance of quality, if there is none, in service of quantity. High advances and movie deals make the news, as do celebrity authors and their book parties and television appearances” (142).

3. “Marginalia: On Editing General Nonfiction,” by Matt
Weiland.

“I also remind the reader that clarity is king. ‘There is nothing that requires more precision, and purity of express, than to write in a familiar style,’ as the great English essayist William Hazlitt put it nearly two hundred years ago. ‘To write as anyone would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force,and perspicuity. . .’ To me these are the cardinal virtues of strong, convincing English prose. (Hazlitt’s last term, meaning ‘clarity,’ is now, alas, an antique word)” (173).

These essays are ones that I shall refer to again and again as I attempt to maintain a writing and a publishing life. Perhaps the reader might like them, as well.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-29 Hawaii

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Thinking in Twelves

9/14/2018

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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

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Handmaid's Tale: Literature of Witness

8/24/2018

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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

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'Patrick Melrose': the Skeletal Remains of a Family

7/27/2018

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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

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Call Me by Your Name, Romance with a Big "R"

1/26/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
I know that many people kill off their real personality just to fit into this society, but why do we have to compromise? I never understood that. I decided to try to be myself and to live by my own values rather than those of others.
Novala Takemoto
Born January 26, 1968

N. Takemoto

My Book World

Aciman, André. Call Me by Your Name.
New York: Farrar, 2007.

This novel is a romance, both with a capital “r,” the kind that emphasizes subjectivity of the individual, and the small “r” kind, the Harlequin type that you must devour page by page, word by word, until you come to the final sentence of this desperate love affair between two young men.

I found the first half tediously slow. But then I thought, Aciman must want us to be inside the head of the protagonist narrator, Elio. These are the mind and heart of a seventeen-year-old boy who can’t decide who he is whether it’s with regard to sexual orientation or his prodigious musicianship (he transcribes manuscripts from one instrument to another and sells them). His mind belabors everything including the appearance of a young graduate student, Oliver, who comes to live in his family’s Italian villa for the summer of 1983, a tradition Elio’s father, a professor, has begun years before: the summer intern.

Both Elio and Oliver waste half the summer semi-rejecting one another, making love to girls, until finally Elio becomes more aggressive and discovers Oliver has wanted him since they first met. Their first kiss doesn’t occur until page 81. But for a short, intense two weeks they become so close that they almost become one, wearing each other’s clothing, Elio especially in love with a red swim suit of Oliver’s. The very idea of calling each other by their own names—taking the name your parents have given you and calling your lover by that name—is a mental flip the reader must make to understand the depth of their intimacy:

“Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth” (142-3).

Aciman carries the development of this intimacy, which in the form of a deep friendship is to last forever, to the very last sentence of the book:

“If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name” (248).

Through the specificity of this scenario, Aciman reveals a universal story of desire and love. We’ve all been there, and wow, should our lives turn out as exciting as those of the two men characterized in this romance.

NEXT TIME: My Literary World

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Award Winner Nails Story

1/15/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.
Osip Mandelstam
Born January 15, 1891

O. Mandelstam

My World of Short Fiction

January/February 2018, David Greendonner. “Lionel, for Worse”: This story, winner of the Kenyon Review Short Fiction 2017 competition, is a gem of understatement. Narrated by a woman, she tells of her husband, Lionel, who a month earlier has lost his best friend, Stan. The woman and Lionel discuss how they’d like to have their ashes disposed of someday. While making a trial run on the shore of Lake Michigan of just such a disposition, using ashes from their own hearth, they encounter some high school girls, one of whom says, “I’m so sorry for your loss” (5). The line is both humorous and subtly poignant concerning the man’s true loss.

Profile of author from contributor’s page: "David Greendonner is from Bridgman, Michigan, and is a graduate of Western Michigan University’s MFA program in fiction. From 2015 to 2017 he was the managing editor of the literary magazine Third Coast" (115).

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States | 2-Oklahoma

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William Trevor's Final New Yorker Story

6/26/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses twenty years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.
Lev Grossman
Born June 26, 1969

L. Grossman

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**June 26, 2017, William Trevor, “The Piano Teacher’s Pupil”: Compression is the primary gift of this story in which a woman, Elizabeth Nightingale, takes on a new young pupil whose genius she detects immediately. ¶ Soon after, following each boy’s lesson, Nightingale notices that little items begin to disappear: a snuff box, a porcelain swan, an earring, among a host of others. The thefts compel her to recall others more significant: the sixteen years she has given to a lover who would not leave his wife, the life she sacrifices for her father because he has given his to her. A master can break all the rules—no dialogue, perhaps too much exposition or telling—but Trevor does so with impeccable taste and grace. By story’s end we both adore and pity Miss Nightingale.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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A River That Divides

6/9/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
A really interesting life has embraced everything from the most magnificent exultation to the depths of tragedy. I would say that's tremendous experience—but I wouldn't say enjoyment is an accurate summary of it!
Marcia Davenport
Born June 9, 1903

M. Davenport

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

Carlos Javier Ortiz

***June 5 and 12, 2017, Will Mackin, “Crossing the River No Name”: Some Navy seals in Afghanistan, in 2009, set out to ambush a group of Taliban. ¶ In this rich story the narrator relates two flashbacks, one rather lengthy, which seamlessly portray the complexities of wars and those intrepid souls who fight them. The author creates character more by interior shots and with zingy names such as Hugs and Cooker than by things visual. He creates character when the narrator encounters a vision of the Virgin Mary in a near-drowning situation. The narrative’s climax may occur when Hal, the Big Kahuna, disappears beneath the surface of a river that appears on no map, that virtually disappears in different seasons. Is Hal alive or not? The narrator apparently does not know because even though Hal is his best pal, he must carry out a mission of war. This story—with its rich imagery and figurative language—is the sort I love most, one that carries me into a world I would never encounter first-hand, nor want to, but with great skill Mr. Mackin snatches me up and returns me safely to my seat when he has finished with me. If I were awarding four stars it would receive five. The author’s debut collection, which I can’t wait to read, will come out in March 2018.
Photograph by Carlos Javier Ortiz.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2017

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Toy Boy

5/29/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body, it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Born May 29, 1917

JFK

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

Ben Newman

***May 29, 2017, Samanta Schweblin, “The Size of Things”: Enrique, a wealthy young man who lives with his mother, is abruptly cast aside and begins to live in a toy shop he often patronizes. ¶ For his keep he reorganizes the store for the owner, arranging toys by color instead of type. Business booms! The author seems to withhold as much as she reveals about Enrique. Why has he been kicked out by his mother? Why is he so child-like? Why are his unconventional methods so successful? Readers only know what the store owner knows, and though an omission of detail would normally be a storytelling sin, it seems to work here. It allows me to imagine. The author’s book, Fever Dream, recently came out in English.
Illustration by Ben Newman

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Uncovered Ground

5/13/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
I always thought the saddest feeling in life is when you're dancing in a really joyful way and then you hit your head on something.
Lena Dunham
Born May 13, 1986

L. Dunham

MY BOOK WORLD

Whitehead, Colson. The Underground
Railroad. New York: Doubleday, 2016.

The tight structure of this novel is based on twelve chapters—six named for characters and six named for states or regions in the US. Each one shifts readers to where they need to be to follow the life of a runaway slave, Cora, in the pre-Civil War South. Cora’s grandmother, Ajarry, was a slave, and so was her mother, Mabel, who abandons Cora when she’s eleven. Rage governs Cora’s life, fuels her temper and her senses, both of which serve to save her life as she shapeshifts to fit varying situations above ground. The unsuspecting reader who learned in elementary school that Harriet Tubman’s underground railroad was not literal is in for a fantastical ride as Whitehead brings it alive, with stations and steam engines and schedules, even a pump handcar that serves as Cora’s final vehicle of escape. The author’s grasp of history, his simple yet elegant prose, and his understanding of the complex humanity of master and slave serve to create a novel that is worthy of all the praise and accolades it has received.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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E. M. Forster: Of British Tradition

4/7/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Reagan and Bush . . . made the world safe for hypocrisy.
You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again
Julia Phillips
Born April 7, 1944

J. Phillips

My Book World

Furbank, P.N. E. M. Forster: A Life.
New York: Harcourt, 1977.

After reading Christopher Isherwood’s entire oeuvre in 2015-6 and seeing what an influence Forster had been on the man, I felt compelled to read this Forster biography, as well. Isherwood credits Forster with, among other things, providing him with a creative mantra: Get on with your own work; behave as if you were immortal. Isherwood reminds himself, page after page in his journals, that he must remain industrious. Since Furbank does not provide a complete list of Forster’s titles but offers them up in the narrative (and index) instead, it is difficult to realize that Forster, too, produced a broad variety of works, well over twenty. So, a generation apart, Forster provides the model for Isherwood’s ethic. They seem to share similar ideas on literary quality, standards, a certain fussiness in regard to everything. Yet there exist differences between the two men born a generation apart.

Forster, though he does write about sex between men, does not allow it to be seen, particularly Maurice (which is written in 1913-4 but published posthumously in 1971 and made into an Ivory-Merchant film, in 1987) until after his death. Though he becomes sexually active with men at one point, it is not to the degree, I believe, that Isherwood does, the latter claiming to have had over four hundred partners, and yet sharing his last thirty-three years with one man. Forster is never able to find that one man, though I believe he would have liked to. He did have close emotional relationships with other men, but they were mostly married, and in no way did he wish to interfere with those, or gay friends to whom he was not physically attracted, such as his peer, J. R. Ackerley. Isherwood made a break with British culture by making his home in America in 1938-9. Though well-traveled throughout the world, and though he empathized with a great many others, Forster’s being was too deeply rooted in Britain ever to leave. Just the story of the home he lived in with his mother for so many years is enough to complete this picture. When finally vacating West Hackhurst, a rather large estate, it takes the man many months to categorize all the collections of things that had come down to him, and, that as an only child, he now must be rid of: decades, if not centuries, of useless family letters and documents, furniture, clothing, carpets, dishes, art.

Nuggets:

Personal writing of Forster, in which he goads himself to improve his lot:

(1) Get up earlier, out of bed by 9 (2) Smoke in public: it gives a reason for you & you can observe unchallenged (3) try to plan out work, at least by the week (4) more exercise: keep the brutes quiet (5) don’t ever shrink from self analysis, but don’t keep on it too long (6) get a less superficial idea of women (7) don’t be so afraid of going into strange places or company, & be a fool more frequently (8) keep accounts (122).

Here Forster expresses his dismay with how most British authors treat point of view in novels :

A different kind of difficulty was that he had come to feel bored with orthodox fictional form. He told Dickinson (8 May 1922) that he was tired of the convention that one must view the action through the mind of one of the characters. If you can pretend you can get inside one character, why not pretend it about all the characters? I see why. The illusion of life may vanish, and the creator degenerate into the showman. Yet some change of the sort must be made. The studied ignorance of novelists grows wearisome (II, 106).

Furbank’s biography combines two volumes with separate pagination, totaling over six hundred pages, a slog of a reading but well worth the time if one is interested in how a particular author writes, his opinions, his family, his friends and lovers. If one is searching for, as Isherwood does, a literary hero, E. M. Forster possesses a generosity of spirit that, dead or alive, is difficult for one to reject.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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A Short Short Satire

11/28/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual.
Rita Mae Brown
Born November 28, 1944

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Alain Pilon

November 28, 2016, Robert Coover, “The Hanging of the Schoolmarm”: In some iteration of the Old West, a schoolmarm closes down a saloon by winning it in a card game. ¶ One supposes that this short short story is a satire of our civilization in general. Schoolmarm rules the roost until the sheriff usurps her power and condemns her to hanging. She is a brave one, claiming that self pity “is the lowest state to which a person’s mind can fall” (81). One wonders if schoolmarm isn’t a mouthpiece for Coover:

“A landscape of rocks evokes a time before time, and the end-times as well, forcing us, while contemplating it, to live in all time at once, where words have nothing to attach themselves to” (81).

Is this old man’s story deliberately attributed to two-dimensional characters, or is it an example of philosophic sophistication that one admires? The reader must judge the schoolmarm’s words:

“‘That is what rocks express. Though they are otherwise meaningless, they are, in this respect, the most meaningful thing we have, putting us in touch with oblivion. Which is the ineffablest thing of all’” (81).

Coover, eighty-four, not even listed in the Contributors for this issue, has a novel coming out in January: Huck Out West.
Illustration by Alain Pilon.

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!

At new prices. Paper: $10.75 | £7.75 | €8.50 Kindle: $2.99

Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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Living out of Time

10/31/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it's any good, it has a healing quality—a quality that enlarges our human spirits.
Katherine Paterson
Born October 31, 1932

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Chloé Poizat

October 31 2016, Anne Carson, “Back the Way You Went”: This sparse story is divided into three parts, each, it would seem, tangentially or even obscurely related to the other. ¶ In “Garland,” a woman recovering from loss becomes a bee as her two bee friends, later divorcing, attempt to ease her pain. In “Mexico,” a woman and her elderly mother visit her father, an Alzheimer’s patient, in the facility she refers to as the Last Lap. “Trouble in Paradise,” written in first person from an adult daughter’s point of view, highlights a quiet Christmas she spends with her mother-in-law in Ohio. She ends their dishwashing conversation by saying she’s brought a recording of Lubitsch, presumably a silent film by the German director, known for his avant-garde style. This reference, like Carson’s allusion to Gogol, perfectly suits this story which seems to exist outside of any conventional sense of time. Carson’s second New Yorker story in 2016. Her collection, Float, is out now.
Illustrated by Chloé Poizat

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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A Son with a Killer Laugh

10/3/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
A short story can be packed with meaning and impact, with the concentrated density of a collapsed star, but should preferably also have a kind of elegant simplicity.
Jeffrey Thomas
Born October 3, 1957

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Andrew B. Myers

October 3, 2016, Etgar Keret, “To the Moon and Back”: A young Israeli father buys a multicopter drone for his six-year-old son and presents it to him the day after his birthday. ¶ Why? Because he’s divorced, and the mother never allows this father to be present on the kid’s birthday. On this day after, this father take his kid to the mall to get batteries for the drone remote, and at some point a cash register becomes a point of contention when the boy, Lidor, wants that for his birthday present—simply because Daddy has said he can have anything in the store as his second present. Later, having given up on the cash register purchase (offering 2,000 shekels), the father and his son fly the drone at the park. The father cajoles his Lidor:

“Who loves Lidor the most in the world?” I ask, and Lidor answers, “Daddy!”

“And how much does Lidor love Daddy?” I ask while the multicopter drone spins around him, and he yells, “A whole bunch!”

“Up to the sky,” I shout. “Up to the moon and back!” (65).

This story both irritates and delights. You absolutely hate that this father has to perform acrobatics to see his kid and get him to love him, but you love the fact that the father’s willing to perform such acrobatics in order to hear that “killer laugh of his. There’s nothing nicer in this stinking world than the sound of a kid laughing” (65).

Keret’s latest book is The Seven Good Years.
Photograph by Andrew B. Myers.

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!

Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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New Yorker Fiction 2014

9/18/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
I've seen public opinion shift like the wind and put out the very fire it lighted.
Rachel Field
Born September 19, 1894

Hot Time in Tucson

Pacaud/Roberts/Shere

September 22, 2014, Victor Lodato, “Jack, July”: Jack, twenty-two, of Tucson, is a meth addict who’s been rejected by his mother, his sister, and girlfriend, Rhonda. ¶ In a way you feel like a voyeur while reading this story, so intensely does Lodato let us in on what it is like to be a crystal meth user. Living fast is what Jack calls it, life speeded up past the speed of sound. You witness Jack’s stink. You witness his thoughts of the past (sister mauled by a dog, a less than competent mother). You feel the searing July 4th heat as Jack negotiates this fast life. You even glide into the fuzzy, foggy world of meth as he returns to the place where he’s flopped for the last two weeks, the only home he has left. His obese roommate pats his kimono pocket, and answers Jack's silent question with “I do I do I do.” Life couldn’t seem any bleaker than this, yet somehow you hope. You hope. Lodato’s novel, Mathilda Savitch, was published in 2010.
Illustration by Julien Pacaud. Left: H. Armstrong Roberts. Getty (Dog). Right: Sam Shere. Time Life Pictures / Getty (Man).

I WILL MAKE NO MORE POSTS UNTIL AFTER SEPT. 30 | PLEASE PERUSE BLOG ARCHIVES IN RIGHT SIDE BAR. THANKS!

DIY Publishing 101-C

9/17/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
There is no armor against fate.
James Shirley
Born September 18, 1596

Do It Yourself or Use Company "Services"?

It is possible, if you know what you’re doing or if you’re willing to conduct your own on-the-job-training, for you to print a book at Amazon’s CreateSpace for FREE. That’s right! But it means you must also know (or learn) how to manipulate their software once your manuscript is uploaded, to get the fonts you want, positioning text on the page. You must upload your own cover image(s), place them where you want them, select background and font colors and sizes. The final result may be much simpler looking than you would have hoped. But, if your funds are limited and you just want to get a book out there, this might be the route to take.

I would suggest going online to the CreateSpace home page. There you will find six categories. Click on the subheadings to find out more. Also, CS has any number of videos you can view to assist you in every category. I took the path of investing what I think is a reasonable amount of money, largely because I wanted the book to have the best chance possible of having high production values. Having said that, I felt that CS wanted too much money for editing services, given that all my stories had previously been published.

Instead, I located someone local, a friend and colleague named Barbara Brannon, to copy edit the final MS for me. Not only had she critiqued a good number of my stories in the writing group I belong to but she had edited more than sixty books in her career as editor and writer, so I felt quite confident in her abilities. And even though all the stories in my collection had been vetted, in a sense, by way of their appearance in nationally recognized literary journals, Barbara still located errors! And there was stylistic consistency, an overall look of the MS, to consider. She also cleaned up the MS by inserting page breaks where appropriate and using a paragraph indention of .4 of an inch instead of the standard tab indention. She prepared the MS to upload for the Kindle app! And she charged me far less than CreateSpace would have, what the local market would bear.

Depending on where you live, you too may be able to find a competent editor for less money than CS will charge you. And no matter how fine a writer you are, you will need to find an editor or copy editor. If you go it alone, your eyes may overlook the same homonym error a million times or perhaps that unintended fragment or comma splice. A fine editor will not interfere too much with the content of your work; a fine copy editor will see to it that your copy reads smoothly and in a consistent voice throughout the MS. A fine editor will give you choices when it comes to revising the copy so that it reads well and conveys the meaning you originally intended.

CreateSpace offers services to help the writer develop the interior and cover of his or her book. CS also makes available marketing services. Again, I urge you to locate the CS home page online and find out what services it provides. CS also affords you a handy device that allows you to calculate what your royalties might be, thus allowing you to set a reasonable price for your book. Most of all, I believe, self-publishing is about creating a book that represents your sensibilities. The one problem with traditional publishing is that once your MS is purchased, your MS ceases to be yours!

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

A Rose by the Name of Macaulay

9/16/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
I have discovered that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them . . . .
William Carlos Williams
Born September 17, 1883

My Book World

Macaulay, Rose. The Towers of Trebizond. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York, 1956.

I came upon Ms. Macaulay when I was searching for a female writer born on August 1 to use in my “Writer’s Wit” citation for that date. The book sounded interesting because according to the woman’s biography, she struggled at times with whether she would live a secular life or a Christian one, and her work reflected such a conversation.

The book obviously takes place in Turkey, throughout the Middle East of a much earlier time. And obviously, neither men nor women could easily travel there today.

Information I’ve adapted from the back cover tells the plot in a nutshell: The narrator, Laurie, relates the story of herself, her Aunt Dot and camel (whom Laurie borrows from time to time), and Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg. They are traveling from Istanbul to Trebizond to spread Christianity; Laurie is perhaps more devoted than her Aunt Dot, though they both seem to fade in and out on that matter. Along the way this troupe encounters spies, a Greek sorcerer, an ape, and Billy Graham with a busload of evangelists. The novel is part travelogue and part comedy of manners, “a bracing meditation on the perils of love, doubt, faith, and spirituality in the modern world.”

This novel is considered by many to be Macaulay’s finest. I found it interesting, but I must confess that it would have been more entertaining had I ever traveled to that part of the world myself . . . and if I’d studied more ancient history; many of the references were lost on me. And I believe her “wit” to be a bit anachronistic, perhaps understandable to the British and/or those who lived as adults at the time she wrote this book. I have the hard copy if anyone should want to borrow it! Let me know.

NEXT TIME: DIY PUBLISHING 101-C

New Yorker Fiction 2014

9/11/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
Michael Ondaatje
Born September 12, 1943

A Long Way to Ireland

Michael Marcelle

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

New Yorker Fiction 2014

8/28/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Lend me your vast noise, your vast gentle speed, your nightly slipping through a lighted Europe, O luxury train! And the agonizing music that sounds the length of your gilt corridors, while behind the japanned doors with heavy copper latches sleep the millionaires . . .
Valery Larbaud
Born August 29, 1881

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

Heart

8/25/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
“A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.”
Christopher Isherwood, from his novel, *A Single Man*
Born August 26, 1904

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

New Yorker Fiction 2014

8/21/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.
Annie Proulx
Born August 22, 1935

Fragility of Childhood

Joss McKinley

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

Stunned by Stoner

8/18/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
What divides men is less a difference in ideas than a likeness in pretensions.
Pierre Jean de Béranger
Born August 19, 1780

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

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