Blog - www.richardjespers.com

'On the Beach' Ultimate of Global Warming

11/12/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
I have a color-coded computer spreadsheet that divides things down to chapter fragments. Each character's point-of-view is a different color. The text of the manuscript is color-coded the same way. The last thing I do before submitting the manuscript is turn all those colors back to black.
Neal Shusterman
Author of Thunderhead
Born November 12, 1962

N. Shusterman

My Book World

Shute, Nevil. On the Beach. New York: Morrow, 1957.

This novel, which could have worked as a cautionary tale in its publication year, 1957, can still bring shivers to one’s spine. In this narrative, the worst has already happened, a vague war begun, on accident, between Russia and China, in which nuclear warfare destroys most of the northern hemisphere. Only the Australians and other South Pacific cultures survive . . . for a while. As we know, such high amounts of radiation kill immediately and keep on killing over weeks and months as its fine particles continue to float to earth. The main characters realize intellectually what will happen but continue to live as if death won’t come, racing in a local grand prix, planting a garden one won’t benefit from, collecting presents for one’s children when one “returns” to his family in America. Shute is deft in creating what looks like denial and yet is a way for characters to cope, until the very end. At that time, little red pills of barbiturates have been distributed like penny candy, and we see each one take his or her dosage and end their lives peacefully. We are made to consider, however, what will happen to the earth itself. After a number of years, so Shute believes, the radiation will clear, the earth will be ready for inhabitation again. It shall repopulate itself with some kind of creatures. The novel has one final lesson for those living today. Nuclear war is the ultimate global warming, the ultimate in climate change. Forever. The thought should still give us pause.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

Kerouac: Underground Author

10/1/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Sometimes we need pure relief. Sometimes we need pure escapism. Sometimes we need major reflection on some aspects of our collective unconscious.
Marielle Heller, Director
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Born October 1, 1979

M. Heller

My Book World

Amburn, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.

I got what I deserved for reading this book: perpetual arousal. My God, maybe one of the most sex-laden books of literary biography I’ve ever read: all about one man and his friends and lovers. According to Amburn, Kerouac keeps a sex list of not only his partners but how many times they engage. It amounts to a sexual track meet of stupendous proportions (if self-reporting is accurate): sex with men, sex with women. Maybe the man had a third testicle? Enough of that.

Because Amburn turns out to be Kerouac’s final editor, a young man attempting to make his mark in publishing, he stands to have one of the most tolerant and understanding viewpoints of the controversial author of On the Road and at least a dozen other novels. Like a number of important American authors before him, Kerouac is ahead of his time, ahead of what critics are capable of understanding. Like many writers, he must scramble for money nearly his entire life, never experiencing the adulation that is to come after his premature death, when he dies at forty-seven of alcoholism. But if anything, he remains a hero of young writers of all ages, writers who are willing to put everything on the line, to write novels the way they want to, not kowtowing to editors, publishers, or even the public. For that, yes, he is a true hero.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire

Fond but Sad Farewell

9/24/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
Horace Walpole
Author of The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy
Born September 24, 1717

H. Walpole

My Book World

García, Rodrigo. A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez. New York: HarperVia, 2021.

The son of Gabriel García Márquez writes a brief but compelling remembrance of his famous father and formidable mother. Each of the five parts begins with a brief epigraph from one of Márquez’s works. North American culture has so much to learn from our friends in South America whose profound sense of family—in spite of its many complexities—outshines our own. I found myself envying the relationship that Rodrigo has with his parents, his brother, his own children and his nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, grandparents long gone but whose influence seems eternal—no wonder Márquez could write a book as profound as One Hundred Years of Solitude. He needed only comb his own ancestry for his complete cast of characters. I envision myself reading this book again and again.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Amburn Ellis's Subterranean Kerouac.

A Writer's Wit: Chang-Rae Lee

7/29/2021

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.
Chang-Rae Lee
Author of My Year Abroad
Born July 29, 1965

C-R Lee

Tomorrow: My Book World | Catherine Raven's Fox and I

A Writer's Wit: Malcolm Lowry

7/28/2021

Muzzle a dog and he will bark out of the other end.
Malcolm Lowry
Author of Under the Volcano
Born July 28, 1909

M. Lowry

FRIDAY: My Book World | Catherine Raven's Fox and I

A Writer's Wit: Iris Murdoch

7/15/2021

Philosophy . . . means looking at things which one takes for granted and suddenly seeing that they are very odd indeed.
Iris Murdoch
Author of The Sea, the Sea
Born July 15, 1919

I. Murdoch

TOMORROW: My Book World | Tales Told in Holland

A Writer's Wit: Irving Stone

7/14/2021

The biographical novel is a true and documented story of one human being's journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form.
Irving Stone
Author of The Agony and the Ecstasy
Born July 14, 1903

I. Stone

FRIDAY: My Book World | Tales Told in Holland

A Writer's Wit: Jane Hamilton

7/13/2021

It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.
Jane Hamilton
Author of A Map of the World
Born July 13, 1957

J. Hamilton

FRIDAY: My Book World | Tales Told in Holland

A Happy Troubled Family

7/9/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Employment is the surest antidote to sorrow.
Ann Radcliffe
Author of The Italian
Born July 9, 1764

A. Radcliff

My Book World

Haslett, Adam. Imagine Me Gone: A Novel. New York: Little Brown, 2016.

Having loved Haslett’s previous work (luuvved Union Atlantic), I jumped in with all limbs once again, and I was not disappointed. In this novel, an American woman meets a British man, they marry, and settle down for a time in London. All three of their children are born there but wind up being raised in New England, where the mother is from. The father is apparently normal (wife gets one big hint he is not just prior to the wedding, but she does not change her plans) until he is not—first losing his career and then sinking into a deep depression. He’s a kind man, a good husband and father, but he wanders into the woods and kills himself. One no longer has to imagine him gone. The title become a multifaceted jewel in which each member (as the first-person POV indicates) can imagine such a thing for themselves.

Another great feature of the novel is that Haslett passes the narration around from family member to family member, thus lighting every corner of this household (the first person is subjective and messy, but that may be Haslett’s intent). Michael is the eldest child, a brilliant person, who, in one chapter writes letters to his aunt about their transatlantic voyage from America to England, letters parodying perhaps the writing of Oscar Wilde; they are that hilarious. The facts are all there, but he is letting the reader know this is how he expresses himself best—at a sardonic slant. Celia may be the most sensible and peacemaking of the three siblings, winds up being a shrink. Alec, the youngest, finally comes out as gay. I like that his story does not take over the novel, that it is just one of five narratives, yet it is handled as sensitively and fully as the others.

The dynamic that sets the tone for this family is how everyone deals with Michael, who has difficulty establishing himself in a career, is always in debt and dependent on his family for help—a family that through the very end is willing to sacrifice everything to save him. Michael is an ultrasensitive person, feeling the hurts of the world yet a bit deaf to the needs of his family. His character is the one who determines the lives of the other four: his actions, his failures, his medical complications, his addictions. The tragic ending is both expected and not. Michael is obviously on a downward spiral, but one hopes, as do all his family, that he will pull out of the dive before it’s too late.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

Cheever's Son Brings Father's Letters Alive

6/25/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Books are something social—a writer speaking to a reader—so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
Yann Martel
Author of Life of Pi
Born June 25, 1963

Y. Martel

My Book World

Cheever, Benjamin, Ed. The Letters of John Cheever. New York: Simon, 1988.

This collection of letters from the 1930s to 1982 is as much about the editor, John Cheever’s eldest son, as it is about the senior writer. So many times in reading a compendium of letters, one is left alone to solve certain puzzles the letters may contain. For most letters Benjamin Cheever glosses events, dates, but most important, personalities, and by doing so he allows readers a deeper view into his father’s letters, his father’s life, the life of their family: John Cheever’s wife, Mary; daughter Susan, Benjamin, and a second son Fred (born Federico in Italy).

Having read Cheever’s journals some years ago, I again encountered his wicked wit, in which he slices humanity a new asshole but also a humane man who loves that very flawed humanity and is kind enough to portray his characters that way. For the wicked sense of humor: “About a month ago Mary took a job teaching English at Sarah Lawrence two days a week and so she journeys out to Bronxville on Tuesday and Fridays and comes home with a briefcase full of themes written by young ladies named Nooky and Pussy” (124).

Or this, with a scintilla of rage: “I got back to work on the book about a month ago, but was dealt some crushing financial blows three weeks later and now I’m back in the short story business. I want to write short stories like I want to fuck a chicken” (125).

And a sweet cat story: “The cat, after your leaving him, seemed not certain of his character or his place and we changed his name to Delmore which immediately made him more vivid. The first sign of his vividness came when he dumped a load in a Kleenex box while I was suffering from a cold. During a paroxysm of sneezing I grabbed for some kleenex [sic]. I shall not overlook my own failures in this tale but when I got the cat shit off my face and the ceiling I took Delmore to the kitchen door and drop-kicked him into the clothesyard” (235).

But ultimately, as I said, Cheever loves humanity and declares as much by way of a Time magazine interview chronicling his career: “My sense of literature is a sense of giving not diminishment. I know almost no pleasure greater than having a piece of fiction draw together disparate incidents so that they relate to one another and confirm that feeling that life itself is a creative process, that one thing is put purposefully upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is replenished in the next, and the we possess some power to make sense of what takes place” (240).

Now for the sex part of this profile: Editor Ben, eldest son to Cheever, discovers that his father is not bisexually bicurious in a furtive, shameful sort of way but has had sexual-emotional relationships with many different men over his lifetime. Cheever’s letters attest to having done the deed with (grad student of Cheever’s) Allan Gurganus (about his son’s age) and photographer Walker Evans about whom he tells this story: “When I was twenty-one Walker Evans invited me to spend the night at his apartment. I said yes. I dropped my clothes (Brooks). He hung his (also Brooks) neatly in a closet. When I asked him how to do it he seemed rather put off. He had an enormous cock that showed only the most fleeting signs of life. I was ravening. I came all over the sheets, the Le Corbusier chair, the Matisse Lithograph and hit him under the chin. I gave up at around three, dressed and spent the rest of the night on a park bench near the river” (304).

I must say that I admire John Cheever’s zest for life, an enthusiasm he did not relinquish until the day he died. And even then?

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

'Appleseed' a Big, Satisfying Novel

4/2/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
You can always find time to do the thing you really, really want to do.
Jennifer Rowe
Author of The Lake of Tears
Born April 2, 1948

J. Rowe

MY BOOK WORLD

Bell, Matt. Appleseed. New York: HarperCollins, 2021.

Every novel creates an environment of its own. Author Matt Bell does so in spades in this ambitious work of three worlds and how they eventually converge. Slowly you do sense the three strands coming together, especially each time that Chapman and Nathaniel come to live with the Worth family and they witness the payoff of having planted apple trees from seed decades earlier.

Bell alternates chapters by way of individual characters beginning with Chapman and Nathaniel (loosely based on Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman and brother Nathaniel Chapman). This strand is set in the 1700s and traces the two brothers as they prepare acres and acres of apple nurseries in Ohio and surrounding states, planting individual seeds rather than using grafting—to earn money in the future. Bell makes Chapman’s character even more legendary by creating him as half human/half faun (a mythological character, not a fawn).

The other two strands—a science-fiction thread set in the latter half of this century, and a thousand years from now when the earth is experiencing a new ice age, creating an environmental plea—alternate back and forth between the Appleseed thread until the cataclysmic climax and almost languorous denouement. Readers must trust author Bell, that he knows what he is doing because at times you feel as if you’re on a runaway roller coaster ride that won’t end. And the fact that he releases details gradually makes the speculative and sci-fi aspects of the novel more believable, more easily woven into its fabric (and your memory). At one point, he lists five and a half pages of what have become extinct species, and you make yourself read every one of them, to the experience the pain of what it would (will?) be like to lose that many creatures in the future.

Bell creates the novel’s own vocabulary, much like Anthony Burgess does in his A Clockwork Orange and other works—they are endemic to that novel. Words like “rewilder” (persons attempting to rebuild the natural world); Sacrifice Zone; Volunteer Agricultural Community (VAC); advertainments; nanoswarms; macrofarms; barkspot; no-when; somewhen. Just a few. (The publisher might wish to include a glossary in the back, in a final edition.) Bell makes a good practice of recapping or summarizing backstory so readers know where they are in the sweep of things.

Perhaps because this copy is the publisher’s “advance reader’s edition,” (I received it as a Goodreads giveaway fulfilled by HarperCollins) it may feature more than its fair share of typographical errors, but I list the ones I found because it’s a thing I do:

Typo: “hope_ are” (184) should be “hopes are”
Typo: “unlike t he one” (232) should be “the”
Typo: “Chapman say_,” (297) should be “says”
Typo: “Eury most not expect” (311) should be “Eury must not
expect”
Typo: “if Earthtrust was a country” (362) should be “if Earthtrust
is a country” to be consistent with contextual use of present   tense.

Reading Appleseed is a big ask, not so much on the part of the author (who is excused on the basis of creative control) or the publisher but on the part of literature itself. One must approach the novel with an open mind, especially if you don’t often read fantasy, sci-fi, or speculative fiction. Bell produces a phrase that might just rise up as a slogan for our earth’s future: Either we all survive, or no one does (159). Frightening but possibly true.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Kendi and Blain's Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

Universality of Fleshly Ways

3/19/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
from none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies who
makes and keeps his self-made laws.
Richard F. Burton
Author of The City of the Saints
Born March 19, 1821

R. F. Burton

My Book World

Butler, Samuel. The Way of All Flesh. New York: Random, 194- (1903).

I found this late nineteenth-century novel fascinating for a number of reasons. First, Butler undertakes to explore the centuries-old problem of conflict between fathers and sons. The Pontifex family is indeed a family of priests (how audacious of Butler to further his satire by borrowing the word from Roman times). But dear young Ernest Pontifex does not want to follow in his father’s footsteps; and then he eventually does. For a while, anyway. Then he rebels big time, winding up in gaol for molesting a woman, at which time his parents disinherit him. Mr. and Mrs. Pontifex have taken the following line of thinking as they raise their children, including Ernest: “If their wills were ‘well broken’ in childhood, to use an expression then much in vogue, they would acquire habits of obedience which they would not venture to break through till they were over twenty-one years old” (22).

A number of sources advocate for the idea that Samuel Butler was gay, largely because he never married and seemed to maintain a number of close emotional relationships with men. If the subliminal crumb-droppings of this novel mean anything, Butler leaves all kinds of clues that this assertion may indeed be true (as does Maugham in his Of Human Bondage). Ernest’s father, Theobald, says the following: “It is an unnatural thing for a boy not to be fond of his own father. If he was fond of me I should be fond of him, but I cannot like a son who, I am sure, dislikes me. He shrinks out of my way whenever he sees me coming near him. He will not stay five minutes in the same room with me if he can help it” (122). Why is Ernest disposed toward this behavior? Probably because elder Pontifex beats Ernest for any number of reasons (his manipulating mother aids in this process). And which comes first, father’s rejection of son, or son’s rejection of father? When does the endless cycle of enmity begin? At any rate, many gay men are rejected by their fathers because they may see something in their sons that they do not like in themselves. Other clues? Ernest does not marry or marries badly (a bigamist, canceling his marriage) because he doesn’t get women; he has no positive feeling for women (especially his mother, though he forgives her in the end); but he does maintain longstanding relationships with various men throughout his life.

Yet, the most interesting aspect of the novel may be Butler’s treatment of the root of all evil, the way of all flesh: greed, the lust for money. Readers can locate the plot on the internet, but suffice it to say that Butler makes much (a biting satire) of the British notion of passing on wealth to one’s heirs, or not doing so, which action plays a large role in this novel’s satisfying climax and denouement (the elder Pontifexes get their comeuppance for their poor treatment of son Ernest).

Unlike other authors of this period, Butler writes for the most part in a manner that is simple and easy to follow, yet the novel is far from facile. Butler’s is a story that continues to unfold. It echoes throughout homes in England and around the world.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Benjamin Dreyer's Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

College Tales Always Delightful

3/12/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
I write to find out what I'm talking about.
Edward Albee
Author of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962 play)
Born March 12, 1928

E. Albee

My Book World

Kendig, Robert E. Sojourn at Stevenson College: Campus Tales from a Bygone Era. A compendium of whimsical events that actually did occur, modestly embellished. Wilmington: Winoca, 2005.

This book is a satisfying read because the author opts to tell his story of teaching in a college town in the 1930s in a nonlinear manner. Although some characters carry over from one chapter to the next (like a meddlesome underling in the history department), each tale can more or less stand alone.

This book has its poignant moments, but it is largely about humor:

A filling station owner installs a large speaker under the seat (ew) in his customer outhouse and connects it to a microphone. “‘Lady, would you move over please, we’re working down here’” (46-7).

At Stevenson College, students are a bit perturbed because the faculty are “unnecessarily indolent” (78) in standing for the opening and closing hymns. “During the holidays, some of the students—we never knew who were the guilty ones—gained access to the chapel. They ran uninsulated wires through the tops of the cushions on the front pews, and under the carpeting on the floor to the loud foot pedal of the piano and thence to a substantial dry cell battery located to the rear of the instrument” (79).Well, one can imagine that on that day, every faculty member stood for the opening and closing hymns.

Later, the meddlesome underling commandeers the visit of a literary figure from England, attempting to make his visit as English-like as possible, even to the point of faking a British accent in what is probably a mid-South community. All throughout she rudely attempts to guide the discussion away from the local department and what and how the professors teach. Finally, when the woman expresses her fascination with the spelling of British names, the Brit himself has had enough: “This was more than Sir Reginald could stand. He sat upright in his chair and, looking directly at Mrs. Garber, he responded, ‘No, madam, I am not hyphenated. I am not even circumcised!’” (108).

The story that may touch educators comes near the end when Kendig renders how he advises a star pupil who, upon graduating, has the opportunity either to play a professional sport or take advantage of a Rhodes Scholarship. The pupil asks Kendig what he ought to do. The esteemed professor asks him to ponder the following: “But think about the two opportunities ahead of you and assume for a moment that either one can lead to your being famous. Then you might ask, ‘For what would I want to be famous?’”(165-6). I won’t say which he chose.

This is one of those books published by a small press that may not be picked up because it is “too parochial or too regional” in its nature. Yet it is a book that is well edited, well-designed, and one that is both enlightening and entertaining. Kudos to publisher/editor Barbara Brannon for bringing this book to light for all of us.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh

Inside Martin Amis's Story

2/19/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
Amy Tan
Author of The Joy Luck Club
Born February 19, 1952

A. Tan

My Book World

Amis, Martin. Inside Story—How to Write: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 2020.

I believe this novel falls under the category of metafiction (Google: fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions). Martin or Mart becomes a character in his own work (à la Christopher Isherwood and others). His self-consciousness revolves around the writing of his own fiction, that of Saul Bellow, and others. As the customary disclaimer in the front matter states, “Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance . . . is entirely coincidental.” But how coincidental is it when “Martin” or “Mart” spends much of the book citing characters with real names, people like his father, author Kingsley Amis, people like longtime friend Christopher Hitchens, as well as other famous (Iris Murdoch) and not-so figures?

Amis begins and ends (“Preludial” and “Postludial”) the novel by addressing his readers directly, that he is about to give us tips concerning writing techniques. And he does: such advice is scattered throughout the (did I say?) novel, as if indeed, it is a how-to book and not a work of fiction. I like it. It’s odd, but I like it. You can’t help but believe he is digging down deep to reveal what has worked for him and speaks so authoritatively about writing (and with more than twenty-five books under his belt why shouldn’t he?).

However, Amis spends the final 150 pages or so memorializing the life and death of essayist and intimate, Christopher Hitchens. They’re both about the same age. Both straight, both with families. Yet they are Platonic lovers. Martin greets Christopher and sometimes leaves him with a kiss. As his fans will know, veteran smoker Hitchens develops throat cancer, and much of this section takes place at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center. Amis takes readers through every painful step he witnesses in Hitch’s treatment. All to no avail. The man who has always seemed to battle against life and death in equal measures finally succumbs. That is in 2011. Perhaps writing in a fictional mode about this death allows Amis to conceptualize the work differently than if it were in a nonfiction mode. It allows him to eulogize his friend without getting too sentimental about it.

And yet—true to the title’s promise—Amis, I believe, does offer the writer, especially the writer of novels, some sage advice. Oh, and before I list a few nuggets along these lines, I’d like to say I detest the excessive footnotes, particularly in a work of fiction. Is it a kind of laziness by which the author cannot manage to incorporate these ideas into the main text? Or is it a way of padding an already lengthy book and forcing readers to peruse longs passages in teensy weensy little print? Or is it a way of showing off, of augmenting an already verbose passage even more? At any rate, here are some passages about writing:

“So avoid or minimise any reference to the mechanics of making love—unless it advances our understanding of character or affective situation. All we usually need to know is how it went and what it meant. ‘Caress the detail,’ said Nabokov from the lectern. And it is excellent advice. But don’t do it when you’re writing about sex” (27).

Knopf typo: “obviouly” (221).

“Never use any phrase that bears the taint of the second-hand. All credit to whoever coined no-brainer and (I suppose) to whoever coined go ballistic and Marxism lite and you rock and eye-popping and jaw-dropping and double whammy and all the rest of them. Never do it—not even in conversation” (391).

The end of a sentence is a weighty occasion. The end of a paragraph is even weightier (as a general guide, aim to put its best sentence last). The end of chapter is seismic but also more pliant (either put its best paragraph last, or follow your inclination to adjourn with a light touch of the gavel). The end of a novel, you’ll be relieved to learn, is usually straightforward, because by then everything has been decided. And with any luck your closing words will feel preordained (394).

In his Inside Story Amis writes about so much more: Philip Larkin’s death, 9-1-1, crises in the Middle East, his life between the early 1980s through 45’s stint as president. Since the work is fiction can we believe “Mart” when he says this will be his last book? I hope not.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Annie Proulx's Barkskins

A Writer's Wit: Joyce Maynard

11/5/2020

It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.
Joyce Maynard
Author of The Best of Us: A Memoir
Born November 5, 1953

J. Maynard

TOMORROW: My Book World | Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow

A Writer's Wit: Martin Cruz Smith

11/3/2020

The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.
Martin Cruz Smith
Author of Gorky Park
Born November 3, 1942

M. C. Smith

FRIDAY: My Book World | Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow

A Writer's Wit: A. N. Wilson

10/27/2020

If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that's honey.
A. N. Wilson
Author of The Mystery of Charles Dickens
Born October 27, 1950

A. N. Wilson

FRIDAY: My Book World | George C. Edwards's Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America

A Writer's Wit: Doris Lessing

10/22/2020

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing
Author of The Summer Before the Dark
Born October 22, 1919

D. Lessing

TOMORROW: My Book World | Fiona Hill's Mr. Putin

The Tragedy of Richard Yates

10/9/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
I grew up in an affluent suburban world and never worried about money until I'd grown up and found wonderfully original ways to screw up my life.
K. A. Applegate
Author of The One and Only Ivan
Born October 9, 1956

K. A. Applegate

Bailey, Blake. A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. New York: Picador, 2003.

Tragedy is a horrendous thing for any human to endure, and yet we all do endure it to one extent or another: adverse childhood experiences, deaths, career failures, and more. The author of this exhaustive literary biography, Blake Bailey, does not employ the word lightly, neither in the title nor how he uses it throughout the book. Bailey’s subject, novelist Richard Yates, born in 1926, has about as tragic life as one can live, yet Yates uses it to formulate his fiction with a high degree of success, perhaps too well, to listen to some critics, many of whom are put off by his lack of “happy endings” or his “dim view” of humanity.

No matter what, Yates comes by his viewpoint honestly. In short, his parents’ divorce, not to mention he is raised by a mother who probably has a better opinion of herself than her real talents manifest themselves in her life. She believes herself to be an “artist,” and because of her opinion, her two children (Richard and sister Ruth) are always at the bottom of her priorities. On the other hand, she is a highly seductive person, among other things, encouraging her young son to sleep in her bed. On nights that she stays out late or all night, the boy child lies in bed, wondering where she is. And when she comes home and falls in next to him and vomits on his pillow, his rage is stoked in a way that remains with him his entire life.

Some nuggets:

“. . . he fixed on his round eyes and plump lips as physiognomic signs of weakness; more to the point, he thought they made him look feminine, ‘bubbly,’ and he had a lifelong horror of being perceived as homosexual” (39). Hm, I wonder why, with the mother thing he has going on.

Friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut writes about war: “People don’t recover from a war. There’s a fatalism that he [Yates] picked up as a soldier. Enlisted men are surprisingly indifferent to survival. Death doesn’t matter that much” (75).

Friend and former student DeWitt Henry notes: “Dick cultivated an anti-intellectual manner, but there was nothing phony or affected about it. In places like the army and tuberculosis wards he was put in contact with unlettered people, who were just as sensitive as anybody else” (78). Yates did his best to capture natural intelligence in characters, and, in life, in his teaching at the Iowa Workshop, he landed hard on any, any arrogant student who put another’s writing down.

Yates discovers what the term “objective correlative” means: “I had never understood what Eliot meant by the curious phrase ‘objective correlative’ until the scene in Gatsby where the almost comically sinister Meyer Wolfsheim, who has just been introduced, displays his cuff links and explain that they are ‘the finest specimens of human molars.’ Get it? Got it. That’s what Eliot meant” (109). He now gets that Wolfsheim, true to his naturalistic name, traffics in human flesh and uses his understanding to find such tokens for his own characters.
“Flaubert offered a further tutorial on the proper use of the ‘objective correlative’—the telling detail that transmits meaning and emotion without laboring the point” (175)

“The only hope of escape was to write a successful novel—the raw material of which, he already sensed, would be the stuff of his own predicament. But he wanted to transcend the merely personal, to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment and self-pity” (175).

Bailey comments on claims of French critic, Jacques Cabau, that Yates is a master: “Not surprisingly the Frenchman was especially pleased by Yates’s insights into the hollowness of American life: ‘Eleven Kinds of Loneliness—a courageous theme in America, where loneliness is a sin, where success is obligatory and happiness is the first duty of every citizen’” (271).

Long-term friend and publisher, Sam Lawrence, says at Yates’s funeral (more of a come-as-you-are wake): “‘He drank too much, he smoked too much, he was accident-prone, he led an itinerant life, but as a writer he was all in place. He wrote the best dialogue since John O’Hara, who also lacked the so-called advantages of Harvard and Yale. And like O’Hara he was a master of realism, totally attuned to the nuances of American behavior and speech. You know what I think he would have said to all this? ‘C’mon, Sam, knock it off. Let’s have a drink’” (607).

Anyone wanting to get inside the head of one of the greatest American twentieth-century novelists must consider reading this book. It’s that great. My second-hand copy is marked with a “WITHDRAWN” stamp from the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library in Indiana. Guess it wasn’t much of a hit there.

NEXT FRIDAY: Michael Waldman's The Fight to Vote

The Two Real Lolitas

11/23/2018

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

My Book World

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

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

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

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

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-31 South Carolina

A Writer's Wit

9/27/2018

What happens when you get any kind of entrenched power is that it just becomes kind of corrupt and self-serving.
Irvine Welsh
Born on September 27, 1961

I. Welsh

NEXT TIME: My Book World