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Young Mungo: A Child Is Abused

8/12/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Author of The Circular Staircase
Born August 12, 1876

M. R. Rinehart

My Book World

Stuart, Douglas. Young Mungo: A Novel. New York: Grove, 2022.

Think about the worst things that happen to you before you turn sixteen. None of the disasters most people experience are as bad as what young Mungo faces in his squalid life in Glasgow, Scotland. And as readers, we live it with him, the mother who both loves and neglects Mungo, the bright sister who has a chance to escape the “housing estate” where they all live in a certain squalor, the bully older brother who tries to toughen up Mungo so that he can survive this life without a father. The mother, whose intentions are not entirely clear, because she is often drunk, sends young Mungo on a weekend trip with two known sex offenders, one old and one in his twenties. This is the strand of the story that perhaps grabs our attention most. In alternating chapters, author Stuart seamlessly weaves this story with Mungo’s falling in love with a neighbor boy his age. The scenes in which they engage are some of the most authentic I believe I’ve ever read concerning adolescent love. Mungo is Protestant, and his friend James is Catholic. Their differences threaten to tear them apart at several points. Mungo’s appellation is no accident. He is named after Saint Mungo, and he is often called to the front of a classroom to read aloud about the myths of Saint Mungo. His favorite myth is the one in which Saint Mungo brings a robin back to life. It is this motif that is reflected later on in young Mungo’s own story, but I’ll let readers discover it for themselves as they devour this important novel about who the weak and the strong really are.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Ted Hughes
WEDS: AWW | Herta Müller
THURS: AWW | Nicole Krauss
FRI: My Book World | Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

A Writer's Wit: Suzanne Collins

8/10/2022

I think it's very uncomfortable for people to talk to children about war, and so they don't because it's easier not to. But then you have young people at eighteen who are enlisting in the army, and they really don't have the slightest idea what they're getting into.
Suzanne Collins
Author of The Hunger Games
Born August 10, 1962

S. Collins

Coming Next:
THURS: AWW | Alex Haley
FRIDAY: My Book World | Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo

The Tedium of Suffering

8/5/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Conversation . . . is the art of never appearing a bore, of knowing how to say everything interestingly, to entertain with no matter what, to be charming with nothing at all.
Guy de Maupassant
Author of "The Necklace"
Born August 5, 1850

G. de Maupassant

Price, Reynolds. The Promise of Rest. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Price has created what, at times, seems like a tedious novel. And frankly, in one sense it is. The story of a young man suffering a slow death, from AIDS, is both tedious and yet breathlessly fleeting. Millions of lovers (in the parlance of that era) and family members (those who didn’t shrink from caring) in real life have experienced the same tedium that Price re-creates here, and yet once you begin the journey of Wade’s slow demise, you don’t want to leave him behind. Even though this story is over twenty-five years old, it seems transcendent, timeless. Wade’s mother and father who’ve separated. His lover, Wyatt, who kills himself. Wyatt’s sister, Ivory, her quiet yet affirming love for Wade. All of Wade’s aunts and uncles. Secrets! Oh, my, this novel is loaded with them, none of which I shall divulge, but all of them are woven together to create a narrative marking an era that has never really ended—merely shunted aside.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Philip Larkin
WEDS: AWW | Suzanne Collins
THURS: AWW | Alex Haley
FRI: My Book World | Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo

'Weird Pig' Talks

7/8/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
I am prepared to believe that a dry martini slightly impairs the palate, but think what it does for the soul.
Alec Waugh
Author of A Spy in the Family
Born July 8, 1898

A. Waugh

My Book World

Foreman, Robert Long. Weird Pig. Cape Girardeau: SEMO P, 2020.

Reading this book is almost like perusing a graphic novel except, as with most reading, readers must imagine the cartoon images themselves. And it may be less scary that way, for Foreman tackles the satirizing of some tough subjects. Industrial farming, something about which a pig (if it could talk . . . and this one does) would have something to say. Creative writing and the publishing business—awash in their own absurdities. Gun violence—a germane topic right now. The character Weird Pig is basically an asshole, but for some reason, we like him and some of his antics. Why? He may give voice to some of our own discontent, some of our own worst impulses either to straighten out society or blast it all to hell. And eventually, Weird Pig does get his in the end, so you wouldn’t want to like him too much.

COMING NEXT:
MON: STRUCTURES OF THE WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY
TUES: AWW | Pablo Neruda
WEDS: AWW | Wole Soyinka
THURS: AWW | Isaac Bashevis Singer
FRIDAY: My Book World | Charles Pellegrino's Her Name, Titanic

England: Island of Last Hopes

7/1/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Discouragement seizes us only when we can no longer count on chance.
George Sand [Amantine Dupin]
Author of Middlemarch
Born July 1, 1804

G. Sand

My Book World

Olson, Lynne. Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War. New York: Random, 2017.

This book ostensibly is about the United Kingdom and its role in World War II, but its story is so inextricably woven with the war on the continent, as well as U.S. involvement, that it becomes a much larger tale. Author Olson writes history in an absorbing fashion by doing two things. She, of course, follows and reports the facts (spending ten years writing this book), but she also unfurls the story with a narrative flair sometimes missing from history books. She achieves the latter by developing major and minor characters so that they are three-dimensional. For example, with regard to some major players—Belgium, Holland, France, and Norway—she helps readers become acquainted with both the strengths and weaknesses of its leaders: Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, Leopold III of Belgium, de Gaulle of France—as they take refuge in London for the duration.

While relating the story of Nazi cruelty and the utter depravity of war, Olson stops to tell “little” stories: that one Czech citizen, Madlenka Korbel, one day grows up to be Madeleine Albright. That fifteen-year-old Audrey Kathleen Ruston, living with her mother in Arnhem, Holland, the site of a major conflict, is so emaciated at the end of World War II that she barely weighs ninety pounds. Nutrition will always be a problem for the girl who is to become actor Audrey Hepburn. Olson quotes Hepburn: “I still feel sick when I remember the scenes . . . . It was human misery at its starkest—masses of refugees on the move, some carrying their dead, babies born on the roadside, hundreds collapsing with hunger” (387). These are the sorts of details that make this book a pleasure to read.

One other thread is particularly poignant, that of Brigadier General John Hackett, “Shan,” originally from Australia but serving the UK. He is paratrooper who is shot down and injured as part of the Arnhem conflict. He is taken in by three Dutch unmarried sisters—Ann, Mien, and Cor de Nooij—and nursed back to health for many months until he can return to England. He is so moved by their love and care and their courage that in years to come, he returns to Arnhem again and again; likewise, he and his wife open their home to the sisters in the UK for future visits. They become family. This chapter is titled “I Was a Stranger and You Took Me In.” It is just one of the many moving stories interlaced with the UK’s status as the “last hope island” of the war. I’m delighted I found time to read this book.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Robert Long Foreman's Weird Pig

'Swing Time' Swings on a Star

6/17/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Imagine if Reconstruction had actually honored the citizenship of four million freed people—provided the education, political autonomy, and economic wherewithal warranted by their and their ancestors’ hundreds of years of free labor. If, instead of continually re-fighting the Civil War, we had actually moved on to rebuilding a strong, viable South, a South where poor whites, too—for they had been left out as well—could gain access to proper education. Imagine.
Carol Anderson
Author of White Rage
Born on June 17, 1959

C. Anderson

My Book World

Smith, Zadie. Swing Time. New York: Penguin, 2016.

I often make marginal notes throughout a novel I read, but I allowed this one to wash over me instead, primarily because I couldn’t put it down. Swing Time is, in part, a showbiz novel because the narrator, following college, gains employment as a personal assistant for an American pop star ten years her senior, the single-named Aimee. But first readers must learn of this nameless narrator’s early life in London in which her best friend (at the time) is also biracial (her mother black, her father white, whereas the situation is reversed for her friend, Tracey). She and Tracey meet in dance class, and Tracey’s “pig nose” is highlighted numerous times in the beginning so that one never forgets what Tracey is like, both her looks and her demeanor. She is a slovenly, take-no-prisoners, strong-willed female whom the narrator admires, at least to a point. Though Tracey winds up with the “real” career in show business as a dancer, it is the narrator who, for a decade, at least, derives some status by way of a well-paid and exciting career.

The novel makes a big leap when the setting moves from the UK to Africa, where pop star Aimee decides to build a school for children. The narrator is then dragged into a milieu for which she is unprepared. I admire the way in which Smith seamlessly advances the novel with a back-and-forth movement from era to era, from location to location, chapter by chapter, until readers arrive once again at the present day (2018) of cell phones and social media, phenomena lacking during the girls’ childhoods of the early 1980s. The narrator commits one great sin involving her boss, Aimee, and loses her job. She then returns to London to catch up with her mother, a feminist, who has never been the nurturer her father was. A great read that explores contemporary treatment of race, fame, family, and friendship.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Phillip Crawford, Junior's Railroaded: The Homophobic Prosecution of Brandon Woodruff for His Parents' Murders

Whitman Adored, Examined

6/10/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow
Author of Herzog
Born June 10, 1915

S. Bellow

My Book World

Doty, Mark. What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. New York: Norton, 2020.

This alternately erudite and yet expressive book is enjoyable on a number of levels. If readers are acquainted with both Doty’s prose and poetry, they know that not a word is out of place or mischosen in any way. Doty’s book is divided into five parts each exploring a facet by which readers might find a way into Walt Whitman’s era, his life, and his poetry. It might be used as a textbook for teaching Whitman, at least as an ancillary source. I am now inspired to go to my shelves and reach for that volume of Whitman, whose work I have only touched the surface of. Intertwined with Doty’s exegeses of Whitman’s work are bits and pieces of Doty’s own life and how, as his title suggests, Whitman’s life and work have influenced him.

I have only one complaint, and that is with W. W. Norton. I’m not a copyeditor, and I don’t look for typographical errors when I read, but at least ten jumped out at me, from subject-verb agreement to putting a space between text and an em dash to repeating two words in a row that should not be repeated. One sentence had the verb agreeing with the object of the preposition instead of the actual subject. Pages 45, 106, 115, 134, 150, 154, 174, 231, 254, 269—in case others should like to find them for themselves. These errors are not the responsibility of the author. Shame on Norton—the last independent press in America. To say the least, the company has done better.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Zadie Smith's Swing Time

Novel Provides Glimpse of the Old West

6/3/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
I worked in Harrods as a sales girl and I was so lazy, I just sat on my arse all day. Now I have huge respect for shop girls. It was boring, so I tried to shoplift things, but we'd always get our bags checked.
Susannah Constantin
Author of
Born June 3, 1962

S. Constantin

My Book World

Turner, Nancy E. These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901. A Novel. New York: Harper, 1998.

This book has remained unread on my shelf a long time, I think, in part, because I would always be put off by the apparent poverty of the title. It belies the intelligence of the narrator and story she has to tell. Set in mostly late 1880s of the Arizona Territories, the novel relates itself in the form a diary, a twenty-year period in the life of a young woman, the man she marries, their children, and almost all related family members. While the frontier adventures are exciting (some unique and some exactly like those found in earlier books), the novel may be limited by two factors. One is the author’s use of first person. Readers mostly receive Sarah Prine’s take on things, a bright but uneducated (for a while) youth. The other may be the form of using a diary. Both features seem to limit the amount or kind of information a novel can tell. On the other hand, the author makes good use of both methods to tell this tale of a young woman faced with many pioneer-like challenges: extremes in weather, battles with natives, sexism, childbirth, premature deaths in the family, and more. It offers a personal touch the third person might not. The diary format strengthens the female point of view which may be lost or obscured by male writers of similar historical fiction or literature. I still believe shelf appeal might have been increased by at least straightening out the grammar of the title. How about These Are My Words?

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Mark Doty's What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life.

Kicked Out of Your Country

4/22/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita . . . . “I am come Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
Julius Robert Oppenheimer
Author of Uncommon Sense
Born April 22, 1904

J. R. Oppenheimer

My Book World

Batsha, Nishant. Mother Ocean Father Nation: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2022.

I received this book by entering a goodreads.com giveaway sponsored by the publisher, Ecco (HarperCollins). A galleys edition, this book is scheduled to be released June 2022, so it may be subject to revision depending on its prepublication reception.

The novel is set in a nameless South Pacific Island in the 1980s. Said island is occupied by “Nativists” and “Indians.” When a military coup occurs, putting the Nativists in power, life becomes challenging for the Indians (their ancestors plopped there several generations earlier). The natives claim that Indians have stolen all the jobs, the property that should be theirs. From the Indian perspective, they themselves have worked industriously as farmers and merchants to better their lives, and have gained a certain amount of wealth. One family is split apart, when the only daughter, Bhumi, two years into her university career on the island, must escape to the United States to begin a new life. This leaves her brother, Jaipal, and her parents behind. Their father is an alcoholic who owns his own small grocery, and their mother is a strong but quiet woman nearly worn down by her husband’s abuse. Jaipal’s life is complicated by the fact that he is gay, against which there exists an official stricture. If he is to meet anyone, he gathers with others of his ilk in “hotels” (largely abandoned one must assume) at night with no lights, only their widening irises as they become accustomed to the dark (nice metaphor). Bhumi’s life in northern California is no picnic either. She applies for asylum with the U.S. government but will hear nothing for months and months. In the meantime, to support herself as a would-be student (she audits classes) she works as a nanny for an Indian family. Even so, the woman who hires her is condescending, and the child she must care for is a brat. She ultimately leaves. To tell how the plot is resolved would be to spoil the ending, which is a realistic yet satisfying one.

Nishant Batsha’s writing is commendable, combining excellent plotting in which there is little or no coincidence; most events seem to lead by way of a natural cause and effect to the next event. His characterization is satisfying, he releasing more and more information about characters as time passes. Readers have a sense of what they look like, who they are. He tackles the subjugation of one group by another (hinting of a genocide to come if the last 50,000 Indians do not leave the island when ordered to) with sensitivity and warmth. It provides a certain resonance for our own times, consider what Russia is doing in Ukraine, and what has happened to people of color in our own country for centuries. I wish Mr. Batsha good luck with Mother Ocean Father Nation. It is a new must-read.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Cormac McCarthy's Novel, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

'The American' Never Changes

4/15/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Dogmatizing about punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about any other form of communication with the reader. All such forms depend on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to produce.
Henry James
Author of The American
Born April 15, 1843

H. James

My Book World

James, Henry. The American. With an introduction by R. P. Blackmur. New York: Dell, 1960 (1877).

Sorry to say, but this is the first book of Henry James that I have read. I expect to read others. Set mainly in Europe, the novel concerns the American character, under much scrutiny in the nineteenth century. Briefly, Christopher Newman, thirty-six, takes great advantage of his earned wealth as a canny businessman to travel the world, beginning with Paris. He is offered the opportunity to join a financially failing aristocratic family by marrying a young widow whose first marriage was arranged by her parents. After being smitten with this woman, Newman is then forbidden to marry her by her mother and brother. It may or may not have anything to do with a deep dark family secret. But the rest of the narrative is more or less how Newman comes to terms with not getting what he wants, having his heart broken, as we say.

The book’s language seems fresh, even now, almost 150 years after publication. James reverts to no clichés. His narration is a rich mixture of the American, the British, and French idiom. His characters’ names seem symbolic but not obvious: Newman (from a new country); Mrs. Bread (a servant who spends a lifetime nurturing the woman Newman is to marry); Bellegarde (nice guard, the family “guarding” their wealth, their name, their history). James may depend a bit too much on coincidence, in that often a character who has disappeared for a number of chapters seems to appear out of nowhere, particularly, when Newman leaves Paris for London and there runs into a young woman and her father who are present in the early part of the novel. This incident could occur, but it seems unlikely, yet as readers we buy it by way of the author’s convincing method. Although Newman is brash, he’s brash in his own manner, not being subject to stereotype, and his character does become transformed throughout the novel. By observing the best and worst of European and American cultures, he comes to see himself lodged in a larger context. He accepts the fact that with regard to this one event, losing his fiancée to a convent, he cannot control his life. Wealth means little, an ineffective salve for his eternal ache.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Nishant Batsha's Novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation

Freya: An Independent Woman

4/8/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
The artist who really creates something creates it forever, but the scholar is at the mercy of expanding knowledge and changing habits of thought.
C. M. Bowra
Author of The Romantic Imagination
Born April 8, 1898

C. M. Bowra

My Book World

Quinn, Anthony. Freya. New York: Europa, 2017.

This novel, full of twists and turns, could perhaps, only have been written by a Brit—someone trained in reading and writing wordsmithing-worthy work. The plotting is superb. Characterization sparkling. Quinn gives readers the proper clues, subtle though they may be, and astute readers store them away and can say (or not), I knew it. I knew it was him. Two young women, the titular Freya and Nancy, meet at Oxford during WWII and develop a lasting friendship. But it is not an easy alliance. They both date the same Oxford boy who eventually marries his second choice of the two, Nancy. Freya realizes he is a scoundrel, but her friend can’t see it, not at first. There is a pattern of betrayal among these three characters, each deception crescendoing into a climax that may blow your bobby socks off. Spoiler: Only one false note seems to prevail and that is Freya, in the end, realizes she loves her friend, not in a platonic manner, but as a lover. This does not come out of nowhere; Quinn does subtly, perhaps too subtly, drop breadcrumb clues along the way, but there seems to be no inner struggle for Freya, no clues to the character herself that she could be a lesbian.

Others might argue that the author does inform. After all, Freya puts career ahead of all; she wishes not to marry (while having lots of sex with men) or have children; she blasts off into her life in any direction she wants with little regard for family or friends. She only has one other physical relationship with a woman, and it is in the context of a drunken orgy in which any woman might have sex with another woman. Again, very subtle. And perhaps it is as it should be. The period is late 1940s to late 1960s, a time of awakening, an explorative era in which women, even adventurous ones like Freya, may not know who they are inside and must be whacked up the side of the head by life itself to understand who they are.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Henry James's The American

Splendid Is the Sun

3/4/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
In many parts of the world, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.
Khaled Hosseini
Author of A Thousand Splendid Suns
Born March 4, 1965

K. Hosseini

My Book World

Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Riverhead, 2007.

Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, limns this portrait of two Afghanistan women that is both tragic and uplifting. Enemies at first, because they are married to the same abusive man, Mariam and Laila slowly realize their only way through life is to join together as friends. Both women are abused, one as a child, and both after their marriages. All this occurs over decades through the Soviet occupation and then the Taliban. The story ends just as the Americans enter the scene.

Surprises? The landscape. One is tempted to think that the entire country of Afghanistan is as dusty and dry as the movies and news videos that emerge, but Hosseini makes clear to readers that there are wet cycles, that there exist beautiful, mountainous vistas, as well. Another surprise: how misogynistic and cruel some Afghani men are, the women’s husband being a prime example. As the women toil to raise their children (a childless Mariam becomes a grandmother figure), they form a family structure of their own. After both suffering great losses, the story does end on a truly bright note: “But mostly, Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns” (366). Hosseini possesses a strong understanding of the human condition.

NEXT FRIDAY: John Sedgwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West

American Dirt is Gold to Some

2/18/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison
Author of Paradise
Born February 18 1931

T. Morrison

My Book World

Cummins, Jeanine. American Dirt. New York: Flatiron, 2020.

This novel, an Oprah Book Club winner, has a lot going for it. One, the novel takes readers to a dangerous place (actually many dangerous places) without having to leave their comfortable seats rooted on American soil. Next, it is well plotted. So much of fiction depends on believable coincidence, and sometimes writers stretch that credulity. But from the very beginning, Cummins lays out the plot perfectly, to the point that you say to yourself, Well, that could happen. Third, the author’s character development is superb. One feels what it would be like to have sixteen members of your family assassinated by a notorious drug cartel, grab your young son, and head out of Mexico to el Norte, seeking American dirt for sanctuary. There are many bad players in this novel, but the miraculous thing is (and so true in life, as well) there are many good characters who help this woman and son to piece together a new life after tragedy. The novel is well worth the time, well worth the tears you will shed. If only our tears could translate into help for these poor migrants who flee their countries for a better life.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Cara Robertson's The Trial of Lizzie Borden: A True Story

A Writer's Wit: Lisel Mueller

2/8/2022

Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.
Lisel Mueller
Author of Alive Together
Born February 8, 1924

L. Mueller

FRIDAY: My Book World | Perry & Winfrey's What Happened to You?

Whom Do You Trust?

1/14/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.
John Dos Passos
Author of U.S.A. Trilogy
Born January 14, 1896

J. Dos Passos

My Book World

Choi, Susan. Trust Exercise: A Novel. New York: Holt, 2019.

Boy! (or Girl!), what a ride this read is. Metafiction perhaps at its most confounding, at least for this reader. The first third of the novel seems to be a traditional high school love story gone awry, both David and Sarah soured on, yet still stuck on each other—set in a nontraditional performing arts high school. The setting is all important, as these kids are smart and are striving to become great actors—and are easily manipulated by adults they admire or wish to please. As near as I can tell, the story is set in a city like Houston (imagine primeval swamp with skyscrapers), though the name is never spelled out. Next third of the book changes to the voice of another young woman at that high school, Karen, a superficial friend to Sarah. The author does an odd thing whereby Karen sometimes speaks in first person, and sometimes talks about herself in the third person. Must be a good reason for this. Perhaps Choi is portraying the fracturing of this (by now) woman’s personality. In the third part, readers begin to realize something is off. The story strand they’ve been holding onto is no longer there. It turns out the first third of the book is really “fiction” that “Karen” has written about some real people whom readers now get to become acquainted with in the last third. To say more would create a spoiler, and I’m not going there. While there is much to admire about this award-winning book—its structure and its strong characterizations—it left me wondering if Choi was intent on entertaining herself or her readers. You be the judge.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Jenna Fischer's The Actor’s Life: A Survival Guide

One's Alma Mater in Literature

1/7/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.
Gerald Durrell
Author of My Family and Other Animals
Born January 7, 1925

G. Durrell

My Book World

McCarter, Margaret Hill. A Master’s Degree. With illustrations in color by W. D. Goldbeck. Chicago: McClurg, 1913.

I read this book for two reasons. One, the novel is set in a place modeled after my alma mater, Southwestern College, in Winfield, Kansas. And two, I happened to have a copy I inherited from my grandmother, inscribed with her name and the date, “1915.” Some familiar spots on the landscape do appear in the book: the large “S” of sizable stones that must be whitewashed each year, the Walnut River Valley, Sunrise College substituting for my SC, the actual sunset hill of one hundred feet above ground. Otherwise, the novel is an overly sentimental rendering of one young man’s four years in college. The book is marred by the details McCarter leaves out: how many steps down Sunset hill to the bottom (77), how classes were conducted, where and how students lived, the topography to a greater degree (she does great watercolor washes describing spectacular sunsets). I did, however, get a feel for a certain type of student that both schools, fictional and real, seem to attract: a rough cut outlier, bright enough but unpolished, who arrives at commencement a much-changed person. One who will continue to grow and change throughout life.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Suson Choi's Trust Exercise

Cromwell Comes to Life

12/3/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Writing is very cathartic for me. As a teacher, I hear many students say that writing can be painful and exhausting. It can be, but ultimately I believe that if you push through, the process is healing and exhilarating.
Francesca Lia Block
Author of The Thorn Necklace
Born December 3, 1962

F. L. Block

My Book World

Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall: A Novel. Book One of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy. New York: Picador, 2010.

Quite an enjoyable read, one that combines history and literature alike. I read this one aloud to my partner and was able to hear what a masterful job Mantel does with the language—quite musical. She, more than most writers, makes great use of interior monologue, by which we always know who is thinking what. This retelling of King Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas Cromwell (among a distinguished cast of many) is worthy of all the accolades it has received (winner of England’s Man Booker Prize). Can’t wait to read the other two parts of this distinguished trilogy.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

A Writer's Wit: Ann Patchett

12/2/2021

Praise and criticism seem to operate exactly on the same level. If you get a great review, it's really thrilling for about ten minutes. If you get a bad review, it's really crushing for ten minutes. Either way, you go on.
Ann Patchett
Author of The Dutch House
Born December 2, 1963

A. Patchett

TOMORROW: My Book World | Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall

'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

'Wolf Hunt' a Great Pastiche

10/22/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
If I couldn't get published tomorrow I'd still be writing. It's something to do with feeling so overwhelmed by this experience of life that you have to tell someone about it, and in a way that reorders the experience to make it manageable.
Graham Joyce
Author of The Silent Land
Born October 22, 1954

G. Joyce

MY BOOK WORLD

Brandon, Will. The Wolf Hunt: A Tale of the Texas Badlands. A Derrick Miles Mystery. No City: Gale, 2021.

Full disclosure moment: I am part of the Lubbock, Texas, Ad Hoc writing group of which the author speaks in book’s Acknowledgements page. I mention this fact, not to tout my involvement in the enterprise but to give some context. The author brought bits and pieces of this work in its infancy to our group. Some of it, like all our writing, was rough, a work-in-progress, but always what was generated created great interest on the part of all members. We can’t wait to read more was a common comment. What Brandon has realized here goes far beyond, in my opinion, what might have transpired in less capable hands. This book succeeds in being so many things: a pastiche of the highest order, writing “in the style” of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles; a bit of a cozy mystery; and a great bit historical novel.

Setting the novel in nineteenth-century Texas but always with an eye to England, where its murder victim hails from, the author creates an admixture of American and British English diction born of a particular period. Historical details give great interest and credit to the work, in which, for example, the narrator, Doctor Hooper, uses one of the first Kodak cameras to great effect. The author’s details on how the camera works not only read with authenticity but are crucial to his helping his partner, Derrick Miles, to solve the mystery.

No point in recreating the plot, if one is acquainted with Doyle’s book. Readers will find its points familiar, yet with their own twists here and there. If you’re a mystery junky, or if you just like well-crafted fiction, I trust you will enjoy Will Brandon’s The Wolf Hunt. Get a copy!

NEXT BLOG: November 9, 2021

Fire Is a 'Hazzard'

10/8/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
The healthy and strong individual is the one who asks for help when he needs it. Whether he's got an abscess on his knee or in his soul.
Rona Barrett
Author of Miss Rona: An Autobiography
Born October 8, 1936

R. Barrett

My Book World

Hazzard, Shirley. The Great Fire. New York: Farrar, 2003.

This novel takes place all over the globe, it seems, in the period following World War II. When one first encounters the word “fire,” one believes that the book may be about a single fire. The next false signal is near the end of Part One in which, in a flashback to 1942, one witnesses a plane crash: “There was an explosion after the crash, then a great fire that, despite the rains, smouldered on overnight. The villagers struggled up in the wet, but explosions kept them off” (52). Mere foreshadowing. The main character, Aldred Leith, recalls, as a youth, visiting a monument to WWI in London, one of over 300 steps: “The monument to the Great Fire” (91). Leith, in his thirties, falls in love with a girl of seventeen and eventually marries her, but even that relationship of love cannot save him from the author’s great fire, the war through which he has just lived:

“Even to her, he would not say outright that he was thinking of death: of the many who had died in their youth, under his eyes; of those he had killed, of whom he’d known nothing. On the red battlefield, where I’ll never go again; in the inextinguishable conflagration” (278).

Any war is comprised of fire, from fireball to friendly fire, but Hazzard transforms war from an abstraction into one single, eternal event, as she says, a conflagration.

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 Magical Doorman

9/17/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
William Carlos Williams
Author of Paterson
Born September 17, 1883

W. C. Williams

My Book World

Arenas, Reinaldo. The Doorman. Translated by Dolores M. Koch. New York: Grove, 1991 (1987).

The more I read of Arenas’s work the more I am charmed by a skilled writer’s use of magical realism. In this instance, Juan, a young Cuban immigrant is hired as doorman by a fairly exclusive residential hotel in New York City. He does his very best to learn the names of all the occupants and their quirks and preferences. He fetches and messages for them. He does his best to learn the names of all their pets as well, a veritable Noah’s Ark from the tiniest to the largest. This odd point is where one begins to sense the leap readers are to make, from reality to magic. The animals begin to speak to Juan in “human language,” and at first that seems fine with Juan. But then the situation evolves into something more complicated (no spoilers). Juan is on a spiritual journey to locate a “door” that will lead him and everyone who wants into a better world. Arenas is skilled in dragging along even the most skeptical of us because he has a larger point to make.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Rodrigo García's A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez

A True Crime Scene Postmortem

9/3/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
When you are absorbed in a biographical subject, you get so close you don't realise the potential effect of what you say. You are trying to get at the truth.
Sarah Bradford
Author of Diana
Born September 3, 1938

S. Bradford

My Book World

Brottman, Mikita. Couple Found Slain: After a Family Murder. New York: Holt, 2021.

This true crime book prides itself in presenting a story that is different from others about murder within a family, and I do believe it is an interesting approach. Brottman offers only a few chapters about the dysfunctional family of a young man who murders his parents and the circumstances that may lead him to do such a thing. The rest of the book concerns itself with the young man’s incarceration in the state of Maryland’s mental health and legal systems. Young Brian Bechtold, once he realizes the severity of what he has done, turns himself in to the police. He expects he will go to prison, because, of course, he has committed murder. Instead, to this day, over fifty years of age, Brian remains a resident of Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center. His story is one of abuse by psychiatrists, other patients, and a legal system that does not give healthy support to people with mental problems. If only he were in prison, he would have far more freedom, including the freedom to rehabilitate, serve his time, and get out. But at Perkins he has become a lifer, and oddly, he may be saner than one or two of the professionals who “treat” him. Brottman’s prose is unrelentingly dead, a just-the-facts-ma’am kind of journalism, but perhaps that is what true fans of true crime expect.

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