Category: The Novel

A Writer's Wit: Jean Hanff Korelitz

5/16/2023

As a writer, I have this compulsion to take characters who appear formidable and bombard them with adversity until they crumble. What's interesting is watching them rise again, and seeing how they've changed and grown, if indeed they have.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
Author of The Latecomer
Born May 16, 1961

J. H. Korelitz

Coming Next:
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Robert Surtees
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Diane Duane
FRI: My Book World | Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry

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Irving's Last Book?

5/12/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
I was much distressed by next door people who had twin babies and played the violin; but one of the twins died, and the other has eaten the fiddle, so all is peace.
Edward Lear, English Poet Known for His Limericks
Author of "There Was an Old Lady Whose Folly"
Born May 12, 1812

E. Lear

My Book World

Irving, John. The Last Chairlift: A Novel. New York: Simon, 2022.

I’m a big fan of most of Irving’s early and mid-career books, including his nonfiction. I loved reading Garp, Hotel New Hampshire, and A Prayer for Owen Meany. I had to begin the latter three times until it finally ensnared me and I couldn’t put it down. Perusing The Last Chairlift, sadly, is not like that.

I read this book aloud to my partner evenings over a period of three months. I kept waiting for Irving’s Dickensian afterburner to kick in at about page 100, that thrust that would propel us to the end. It did not engage, not for me anyway. Almost nine hundred pages seems too long for a contemporary novel, I believe. It might have been better served to come in at four or even five hundred pages. Why?

For one thing, there is too much of a certain kind of repetition. Normally, I like some recapitulation, little wrap-ups of or references to earlier events to remind readers what has come before. However, in this novel, Irving has an annoying habit of attaching endearing monikers like the little snowshoer to characters instead of using the character’s name (and his practice seems clunky compared to the Russians who do this rather well). Of course, he alternates their usage with their real name at times, but by the time he does, one forgets who the little snowshoer is . . . or was.

And did someone say ghosts? A few of the characters die along the way (the novel does cover quite a life span), but do they? They keep reappearing as ghosts, but Irving doesn’t have much of a mechanism for readers to grab onto. We’re just supposed to know it. Rather than being led to believe this is some kind of flashback, it is really encounters with ghosts we’re having. I will accept responsibility for sloppy reading, but I’m not sure it’s all my fault. Or are ghosts merely an easy, perhaps sloppy, representation of how the main character misses the people in his life who die?

Finally, Irving has a careerlong fascination with a number of images or motifs: bears or people in bear costumes, an almost homoerotic fascination with wrestling, and also, among others, a perhaps erotic fascination with trans people (and a son who accepts his trans mother, see The World According to Garp). This novel is populated with trans people, yet I never get the sense that Irving has a real feel or understanding of them. There is not enough information present on the page for readers to believe he knows what he’s talking about: complex physical and psychological transformations, surgical or other medical procedures, the emotional angst that must come with such metamorphoses. And always, I wonder why he avoids other LGBTIQA+ iterations, mostly the G one (except for a lesbian couple who must be the last vestige of vaudeville, appearing nightly in Two Dykes, One Who Talks, har har har). Just saying.

It seems that Irving may have wished for this book to be his swan song, and he puts his entire heart and snippets of every motif from his entire oeuvre and mixes them all into a fine pea soup with not a little ham. I don’t know about others, but as I finished this go-around with the latest Irving novel, I could only stomach so much of this rich pea soup. And only so much ham.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Jean Hanff Korelitz
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Robert Surtees
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Diane Duane
FRI: My Book World | Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry : Poems

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Less, More Lost Than Ever

5/5/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
On an exhausted field, only weeds grow.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Author of Quo Vadis
Born May 5, 1846

H. Sienkiewicz

My Book World

Greer, Andrew Sean. Less Is Lost. New York: Little, 2022.

My only criticism of Greer’s first novel in this series, Less, was that readers had to play a guessing game as to whom the narrator was. I felt there were some problems with that mechanism (see my complete profile). Why not just write the narrative in third person? I asked at the time. Less’s lover, Freddy Pelu, could not possible know some of the things Less had experienced. At least, that is what I reasoned.

In this novel, Freddy Pelu is an openly open gay narrator, Less’s partner (the one he finally winds up with in the first novel). And yet, his similar narration of this novel sets up different but similarly disturbing questions: 1) Since the two men are once again separated, we don’t see them together. Less is on an extended book tour, trying to scare up extra money, Freddy off somewhere else. 2) Again, Freddy seems to be narrating Less’s story about the death of Less’s previous lover. Is he actually there to witness all of Less’s torments? 3) Why even have a partner if Less is not even going to engage with him, the least of which would be coitus?

Still, as a summer beach read, Greer’s mixture of apt literary allusions and familiarity with pop culture, the novel is not disappointing. It kept me reading right to the very end when Less, after crisscrossing the USA—combining literary lectures with personal journey—finally meets up with Freddy (although it is only a good guess on the part of readers). If Greer squeaks out a sequel, I do hope that, even if Freddy narrates this one, too, that readers will experience the partners being in the same room!

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Sophie Scholl
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Ariel Durant
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Benjamin Dreyer
FRI: My Book World | John Irving, The Last Chairlift

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A Writer's Wit: Margaret Hill McCarter

5/2/2023

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Joy does not kill any more than sorrow.
Margaret Hill McCarter
Author of A Master’s Degree
Born May 2, 1860

M. Hill McCarter

Coming Next:
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Reza Aslan
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anna Olson
FRI: My Book World | Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost

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Desperation Creates 'Character'

4/21/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.
Nell Freudenberger
Author of Lucky Girls
Born April 21, 1975

N. Freudenberger

My Book World

Fox, Paula. Desperate Characters. With an introduction by Jonathan Franzen. New York: Norton, 1999 (1970).

This story is indeed one of desperation. Set in the late 1960s amid a crumbling New York City (Brooklyn), the middle-aged characters are desperate in different respects. Sophie, married to Otto, an attorney, feeds a feral cat that bites her. Otto’s longtime law partner, Charlie, leaves their firm, but he also becomes involved with Sophie unbeknownst to husband Otto. Sophie postpones having her bite checked to see if she might be the victim of rabies. After she and Otto finally trap the cat to have it examined, she and Otto travel to their country place to find that it has been ransacked and vandalized. Perhaps only a bottle of booze has been stolen, but many items, including books, are completely unusable due to the destruction. They consult with the man whom they pay to care for their property in the off season, not getting much satisfaction when he claims he and his son just checked it a few days before.

Much about this book is unsettling. People with a comfortable life are no longer comfortable with each other or their lives, yet they are loath to abandon them or do anything to change them. The cat bite seems to stand in for the unseen sore that is festering beneath the surface of their marriage. Unless I’ve missed something, we never learn the result of Sophie’s test, whether she’ll have to undergo the twelve rabies shots given to the stomach, one per day for nearly two weeks. Much in the way that we never learn what happens to these desperate people. The way the author must want it. The way many of our lives end up, with more questions posed than answered.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Edward R. Murrow
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Anita Loos
THURS: A Writer's Wit | C. Day Lewis
FRI: My Book World | Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It

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'Mysterious' Childhood

4/14/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.
Arnold Toynbee
Author of Mankind and Mother Earth
Born April 14, 1889

A. Toynbee

My Book World

Heim, Scott. Mysterious Skin: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

Among the best novels I’ve ever read concerning adult male-to-young male molestation. Heim explores the issue inside out, from all angles. The adult, like a hawk (thus, the gay slang, chickenhawk), knows its target’s weaknesses and exploits them: the child’s loneliness, his lack of parental guidance, his need for what seems to be love (though it’s only the predator’s skewed view of love), the child’s own possible homosexuality one day. But another side of it is the fact that the child may perceive he loves this man, as well, in the case of the novel, a baseball coach. One of the coach’s victims is positive the man loves him, all the favors he bestows upon him, other gifts, the apparent affection, even the $5 bill he tosses at his favored victims, already setting them up to become whores. From the beginning, the protagonist is sure he’s been abducted by aliens, and, in a sense he has. The experience of molestation must feel like an abduction—the child’s brain scrambling to make sense of this baffling situation—makes aliens from outer space seem a lot less threatening than dealing with aliens that seem to arise out of the very ground here on earth.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Susan Faludi
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Richard Hughes
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Aubrey de Grey
FRI: My Book World | Paula Fox: Desperate Characters

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Plotting Marriage

4/7/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
The wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind.
William Wordsworth
Author of The Prelude
Born April 7, 1770

W. Wordsworth

My Book World

Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Marriage Plot. New York: Farrar, 2011.

I loved the author’s book, Middlesex, but this novel seems to lack movement. I saw little growth in the three main characters: Madeline, Mitchell, and Leonard. At the end, in this love triangle, Madeline is still no closer to deciding what she wants in life. Perhaps that is all right; she is just out of college, just like the other two. The young man who falls in love with her, Mitchell, is a fellow college student and her best friend since childhood, but when she rejects him to marry Leonard, another student, he takes a protracted world trip with his best male friend. And when Mitchell returns, he finds Madeleine in a mess because she has married Leonard (against Mitchell’s advice) who is diagnosed bipolar, and he has freed Madeleine to divorce him after his major meltdown. Mitchell then lives with Madeleine and her family (they love him) while she recovers. The two even have sex, a meh experience for both of them. The marriage plot, alluding to the title, turns out to be a reference to an academic essay Madeleine has written, finally published by an obscure journal within the last pages of this novel. Leonard has gone to live in the Oregonian woods with a buddy. Hm. Even if “sad,” it seems the novel could have a more satisfying end. Just me, I guess.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Margaret of Valois-Angoulême
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Aleksandr Ostrovsky
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Eudora Welty
FRI: My Book World | Scott Heim, Mysterious Skin

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'woman in White' Is Illusive

2/17/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Author of The Deepening Stream
Born February 17, 1879

D. Canfield Fisher

My Book World

Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Introduction and Notes by Camille Cauti. New York: Barnes, 2005 (1861).

A gem of the nineteenth century, this Victorian novel is intricately plotted down to the last page. (Consult the Internet for the summary.) I’m glad I read it, and it is yet another I can mark off my Jane Smiley list of top one hundred novels (see her Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel). But I must say that even for someone who has much time on my hands, I couldn’t appreciate Collins’s glacial pace in developing complexity. I think we denizens of the 20th and 21st centuries have been corrupted in our ability to stay with something twice as long as many contemporary novels (clocks in at 635 pages). I shall keep trying, though. I shall keep trying.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Anaïs Nin
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Christopher Bram
THURS: A Writer's Wit | W. W. B. Du Bois
FRI: My Book World | Walter Mosley's The Man in My Basement

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Mother and Daughter: Oil and Water

1/6/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.
Elizabeth Strout
Author of Amy and Isabelle
Born January 6, 1956

E. Strout

My Book World

Strout, Elizabeth. Amy and Isabelle. New York: Vintage, 1998.

I regret that this, Strout’s first book, is my most recent one read, after having perused five other Strout books previously. The novel is indeed a tour de force, worthy of premiering a writing career. In it Strout tells the story of titular characters Amy and Isabelle, daughter and mother respectively. It is one of the hottest summers on record in Shirley Falls, a New England town in the 1970s. The site’s yellowing river exudes a strong Sulphur smell. No one has air conditioning, and everyone is hot all the time, in every dwelling whether it is at home or at work. Years before Isabelle has come to Shirley Falls with a baby in her arms. Her husband has died, she tells everyone. Now Amy is seventeen, and her mother is youngish, in her thirties.

Readers in essence become acquainted with the entire town. All of Isabelle’s co-workers in an office where she is the boss’s secretary: Fat Bev and a number of other notable characters. There are Amy’s school friends, particularly Stacy, who is pregnant, and, being the daughter of two mental health workers, is allowed to have her baby and give it up for adoption. The two friends share lunch each day sitting in the nearby woods and smoking a single cigarette each (Stacy hides them in a Tampon carrier kept in her school bag). They are close, yet there are secrets about themselves they never reveal to the other, things that might make one dislike the other (each fears). There is Amy’s middle-aged math teacher, a bearded man, not particularly handsome, but charismatic enough to lure Amy into an illicit relationship. There is the disappearance of a girl about the girls’ age from another town, a story that sends shivers up and down the backs of everyone in Shirley Falls. All of these people have ordinary but messy lives, even though the town is beset with an active church life divided among a number of denominations. Even so, an undercurrent of unease, perhaps some might say evil, brings all these souls together in a manner that keeps one reading as fast as one can.

But one should not read too fast, because by doing so one can buzz by the small and delicious details that Strout plants along the way. Pregnant teenage girl. Middle-age man lovingly seducing his pupil. An ambitious mother with a dark past of her own. Oh, and several adulterous affairs. How could it be a boring narrative? And yet, the novel is not a potboiler in the traditional sense. There is no cathartic ending in which all the bad people get their comeuppance. No real heroes—except in the way that true friends can be heroic to each other. The story ends as satisfyingly quiet as it begins. Yes, after a long, hot summer, where the inhabitants of Shirley Falls are frying in the hell of their lives, the sky opens up and the heavens pour forth rain, providing at last a natural relief. Finally, the characters of Shirley Falls may breathe again. Until the next wave of heat develops.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Pat Benatar
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Also Leopold
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Jack London
FRI: My Book World | Bloom & Atkinson's Evidence of Love

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Some 'Customs' Change

12/9/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
There is nothing quixotic or romantic in wanting to change the world. It is possible. It is the age-old vocation of all humanity.
Gioconda Belli
Author of
Born December 9,1948

G. Belli

My Book World

Wharton, Edith. The Custom of the Country. With an introduction by Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: Scribner, 1997 (1913).

Wharton, portrayer of early twentieth-century America, unveils the life of one Undine Spragg who, in time, will marry three men, one of them twice. From the time Undine is a young woman, she is hard to please. She never has quite the clothes she wants, never quite associates with the people she really wishes to. And when someone, like her parents, stretch themselves to make her happy, she is far from grateful. She is like this with each of her husbands, too, the first one an apparent rube from her small New York City suburb. Then, she marries up, a handsome man who might become a poet, but because she doesn’t wish to live on his small trust and make do, he must go to work. Jumping to France, she marries royalty, but even he doesn’t have enough money, and she leaves him, as well. Finally, she marries the rube again (he just happens to be in France), because since the early days he has become a billionaire. And he gives her nearly everything she can dream of, including a fine home to a little son (by husband two) she his ignored since his birth nine years earlier. She attempts to goad this man into becoming an ambassador (on the book’s last page), but when he tells her that she could never become an ambassador’s wife because she is divorced, she is furious. Wharton ends the novel this way:

[Undine] had learned that there was something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for her. She could never be an Ambassador’s wife: and as she advanced to welcome her first guests she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for” (509).

Wharton’s novel, some say, is prescient for its time, predicting what American society might become like. And along with Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)—whose novels are published at roughly the same time (within a decade)—she limns what can happen to ambitious women who have no place in society except to be some man’s wife.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Kenneth Patchen
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Shirley Jackson
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Muriel Rukeyser
FRI: My Book World | Bloom & Atkinson's Evidence of Love

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Oh, Strout Wins with 'William'

11/18/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy—which many believe goes hand in hand with it—will be dead as well.
Margaret Atwood
Author of The Handmaid's Tale
Born November 18, 1939

M. Atwood

My Book World

Strout, Elizabeth. Oh William! New York: Random, 2021.

“Oh William!” becomes, before this novel is over, rather a poetic refrain uttered by the female narrator, Lucy Barton—a longtime figure in Strout’s fiction. Lucy and William marry when they are very young, then divorce after a number of years. They both remarry, and yet both remain in the lives of the children they’ve brought into the world as well. Strout travels back and forth through time so seamlessly that one is never lost in or by the narrative. It turns out that Lucy, like her creator, is also a successful writer, but Lucy carries a lot of baggage with her. So does William. Poor parenting they received in developmental years. Poverty of various kinds. And it is a good thing that they remain friends because after Lucy’s second husband dies and after William is left alone, they turn to each other to help the other through life’s difficulties as they age into their seventies. A very affecting book by one of my favorite authors.

Coming Next:
TUES 11/29: A Writer's Wit | Sue Miller
WEDS 11/30: A Writer's Wit | Mark Twain
THURS 12/01: A Writer's Wit | World AIDS Day Observance
FRI 12/02: My Book World | Sarah M. Wagner's Swan Wife

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'The Dutch House" a Big Novel

10/7/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Today’s lynching is a felony charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration. Today’s lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, “I’m going to hang you up and burn you.” Once you get that F, you’re on fire.
Michelle Alexander
Author of The New Jim Crow
Born October 7, 1967

M. Alexander

My Book World

Patchett, Ann. The Dutch House: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2019.

If readers want to ascertain the entire plot of this novel, they can consult Wikipedia; it’s otherwise too complex and contains too many spoilers. Danny Conroy, who happens to have graduated high school and college the same years I did, narrates this engrossing but compressed epic about him and his sister, Maeve (in my head I keep seeing the beautiful Maeve character created by Emma Mackey in Netflix’s Sex Education). The brother and sister experience a sort of orphanhood when first their biological mother leaves them as young children—to serve as a missionary in India.

They experience it again when their father dies and their truly wicked stepmother banishes them from their home, the Dutch House of Elkins Park, Philadelphia—the home built in 1920 and probably serving as the central character of the book. Both times, the siblings must serve as parents to each other because they simply have no one else (except for three kind servants who have no legal authority). This intimacy is both helpful and harmful to them: Maeve never marries, and Danny’s wife always feels she’s competing for Danny’s attention. Danny’s role as narrator is similar to the role that Nick Carraway takes in The Great Gatsby, except that Danny’s account is more or less reliable, marred perhaps only by depending on his childhood memories which, in many cases, are distorted by the hurt of abandonment. In all, the novel is a satisfying read, worthy of its nomination for a Pulitzer. It is one of those you could sit up all night reading and fall asleep in the morning quite satisfied, book clutched to your chest.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Eleanor Roosevelt
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Richard Price
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lenny Bruce
FRI: My Book World | Barbara Wedgwood's The Demon Inside

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Egan's 'Candy House' Is Sweet

9/30/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Actually, I love trying to figure out why certain books become hits while others, which may be just as good, have trouble finding an audience.
Jay Asher
Author of Thirteen Reasons Why
Born September 30, 1975

J. Asher

My Book World

Egan, Jennifer. The Candy House: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2022.

This nonlinear novel, similar to Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, is at once fascinating and thrilling, yet challenging to grasp—for me, anyway. As with a roller coaster ride, one must climb aboard and suffer whatever curves come your way. Her title seems to be derived from the following:

Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house (125).

The narrative, which begins in 2010, ventures freely into the mid-2020s and back, centers around children born in the 1980s. One Bix Bouton—akin to a real life Steve Jobs—develops a technology he dubs Own Your Unconscious which, to borrow text from the dust jacket, “allows you to access every memory you’ve ever had, and to share your own in exchange for access to the memories of others.” Like Facebook, from a slightly earlier period, OYU seduces a large portion of the world’s population into its powers. Always be careful what you wish for, Egan’s title seems to caution us, because you might not like what you ultimately wind up with. This idea of knowing all of your thoughts is just like sighting a candy house. You won’t always be able to trust what you find inside.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Heidi Hayes Jacob
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Peter Ackroyd
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Thor Heyerdahl
FRI: My Book World | Ann Patchett's The Dutch House

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Young Mungo: A Child Is Abused

8/12/2022

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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

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A Writer's Wit: Suzanne Collins

8/10/2022

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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

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The Tedium of Suffering

8/5/2022

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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

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'Weird Pig' Talks

7/8/2022

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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

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England: Island of Last Hopes

7/1/2022

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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

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'Swing Time' Swings on a Star

6/17/2022

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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

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Whitman Adored, Examined

6/10/2022

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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

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Novel Provides Glimpse of the Old West

6/3/2022

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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.

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Kicked Out of Your Country

4/22/2022

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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

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'The American' Never Changes

4/15/2022

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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

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Freya: An Independent Woman

4/8/2022

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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

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Splendid Is the Sun

3/4/2022

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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

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