FRIDAY: My Book World | Robert E. Kendig's Sojourn at Stevenson College: Campus Tales from a Bygone Era.
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My Book world Coetzee, J. M. Diary of a Bad Year. New York: Viking, 2007.
Coetzee relates the story of an aging author dying of cancer who hires an attractive young woman in his building to do typing for him. In the evenings the woman relates to her boyfriend what the developing book is like. She also engages in dialogue with the author concerning his strong opinions (also the title of the book). At some point the boyfriend becomes the author’s accountant and devises a failproof plan to cheat the author out of his estate at the time of his death. What makes this simple plot compelling is Coetzee’s structure: the top third of each page is assigned to fragments from the fictional author’s essays. A middle portion of the page, usually quite slim, is a continuing dialog between the author and the typist, where he discovers she isn’t only pretty but smart as well. The bottom section of each page portrays the relationship between the typist and her boyfriend. At least, in theory, one may read all three parts separately, from front to back because Coetzee presents them as three distinct but interrelated stories. However, I mostly read the book conventionally, attempting to keep each of the threads separately yet trying, at the same time, to see how the three threads related to one another. This novel is a fascinating read mostly because of the structure. If Coetzee had given the book a more traditional approach with alternating chapters or sections, it might have been a different book indeed, though I cannot predict how. Such is the alchemy of fine writing by a fine author. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Robert E. Kendig's Sojourn at Stevenson College: Campus Tales from a Bygone Era
TOMORROW: My Book World | J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year
FRIDAY: My Book World | J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year
FRIDAY: My Book World | J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year
My Book World Proulx, Annie. Barkskins: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2016. How does one begin to talk about such a magnificent saga of more than seven hundred pages? Start big. Barkskins (a name for tree choppers) features multiple generations of two French Canadian families: the Sels and the Duquets (later to become the Dukes), as well as the Indians (Mi’kmaw) with whom they intermarry. The family then embark on the timber business. Early in the novel, Proulx informs readers where she’s headed (an exposé of the timber industry’s evil effects), albeit in a subtle manner: “With a pointed stone, he [young René Sel] marked the haft with his initial R. As he cut, the wildness of the world receded, the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass shivered as each tree fell and one by one the web strands snapped” (12). This invisible web connecting all life to the fate of trees across our vast globe is what Proulx limns for us, as well as what happens when greed and myopia control such an influential industry (for a certain period, until all the old growth trees are gone). Proulx does a number of things to make reading this novel a pleasure (I read it aloud to my partner over a period of weeks). In terms of structure, she divides the novel into ten major parts, mostly by broad time periods of twenty-five to seventy years. Within each part she numbers continuous chapters (seventy), each with a telling chapter title—making it possible to digest the novel in small parts. Second, no matter how short appearance a character may make, Proulx creates three-dimensional people readers can relate to. Birth and death are near daily events she treats with objective indifference: “He was no riverman. Before he could collect his season’s pay, he drowned below Wolf Falls and, like countless other fathers, slipped into the past” (277). Last, Proulx conveys verisimilitude. She has thoroughly researched relevant geography, relevant history, relevant information about the timber industry from its earliest days in Canada and New England to modern efforts to “farm” timber, i.e. plant trees for future generations. Perhaps, most of all, Proulx makes us love trees, their forests, both extinct and living: all their possible uses besides building building building. Without stooping to didactic methods, she makes us love these leafy beasts, forces us to see how important they have always been and continue to be to the survival of the world. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year
TOMORROW: My Book World | Annie Proulx's Barkskins
FRIDAY: My Book World | Annie Proulx's Barkskins
FRIDAY: My Book World | Annie Proulx's Barkskins
My Book World Amis, Martin. Inside Story—How to Write: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 2020. I believe this novel falls under the category of metafiction (Google: fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions). Martin or Mart becomes a character in his own work (à la Christopher Isherwood and others). His self-consciousness revolves around the writing of his own fiction, that of Saul Bellow, and others. As the customary disclaimer in the front matter states, “Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance . . . is entirely coincidental.” But how coincidental is it when “Martin” or “Mart” spends much of the book citing characters with real names, people like his father, author Kingsley Amis, people like longtime friend Christopher Hitchens, as well as other famous (Iris Murdoch) and not-so figures? Amis begins and ends (“Preludial” and “Postludial”) the novel by addressing his readers directly, that he is about to give us tips concerning writing techniques. And he does: such advice is scattered throughout the (did I say?) novel, as if indeed, it is a how-to book and not a work of fiction. I like it. It’s odd, but I like it. You can’t help but believe he is digging down deep to reveal what has worked for him and speaks so authoritatively about writing (and with more than twenty-five books under his belt why shouldn’t he?). However, Amis spends the final 150 pages or so memorializing the life and death of essayist and intimate, Christopher Hitchens. They’re both about the same age. Both straight, both with families. Yet they are Platonic lovers. Martin greets Christopher and sometimes leaves him with a kiss. As his fans will know, veteran smoker Hitchens develops throat cancer, and much of this section takes place at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center. Amis takes readers through every painful step he witnesses in Hitch’s treatment. All to no avail. The man who has always seemed to battle against life and death in equal measures finally succumbs. That is in 2011. Perhaps writing in a fictional mode about this death allows Amis to conceptualize the work differently than if it were in a nonfiction mode. It allows him to eulogize his friend without getting too sentimental about it. And yet—true to the title’s promise—Amis, I believe, does offer the writer, especially the writer of novels, some sage advice. Oh, and before I list a few nuggets along these lines, I’d like to say I detest the excessive footnotes, particularly in a work of fiction. Is it a kind of laziness by which the author cannot manage to incorporate these ideas into the main text? Or is it a way of padding an already lengthy book and forcing readers to peruse longs passages in teensy weensy little print? Or is it a way of showing off, of augmenting an already verbose passage even more? At any rate, here are some passages about writing: “So avoid or minimise any reference to the mechanics of making love—unless it advances our understanding of character or affective situation. All we usually need to know is how it went and what it meant. ‘Caress the detail,’ said Nabokov from the lectern. And it is excellent advice. But don’t do it when you’re writing about sex” (27). In his Inside Story Amis writes about so much more: Philip Larkin’s death, 9-1-1, crises in the Middle East, his life between the early 1980s through 45’s stint as president. Since the work is fiction can we believe “Mart” when he says this will be his last book? I hope not.
NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Annie Proulx's Barkskins
TOMORROW: My Book World | Martin Amis's Inside Story
FRIDAY: My Book World | Martin Amis's Inside Story
FRIDAY: My Book World | Martin Amis's Inside Story
My Book World Langella, Frank. Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women as I Knew Them. New York: Harper, 2013.
In Langella’s “Cast of Characters”—notable people he has known throughout his long acting career—he lists them in the order of their “disappearance” from the earth. The first personality is Marilyn Monroe, whom he “meets” in a fortuitous incident as a kid in which he exchanges waves with the woman as she enters a limousine. Further in to the book Langella describes his relationship with John F. Kennedy. This episode also begins his relationship with Paul and Bunny Mellon and their daughter whom he has met first by way of his youthful thespian activities in summer stock. Many of his acquaintances, like these, wash back and forth over one another until he ends his book by way of his long friendship with Bunny Mellon who lives to be 103. Langella is at turns generous and blunt about the talents of these people. With Rita Hayworth he can’t possibly heap the praise high enough. By his account, Bette Davis is an arrogant bitch. Raul Julia is a prince, almost a brother to Frank. Paul Newman is a so-so actor who can’t quite reach down deep enough in to himself to grab the stuff of which great acting is made. The book is also one of confession. Langella, throughout his life, though retaining threads of friendship with hundreds of people, manages to let other relationships fall off. In a stunning chapter, one learns of Elizabeth Taylor’s deep insecurities, about living out her life alone. He tells of his own arrogance when he treats British actor Deborah Kerr dismissively over a long period of time—until it is too late. If readers are to learn anything from Langella’s book it may be that no matter what road we take in life, we owe a debt of gratitude to those who have helped us along the way; it behooves us to help the sick and needy; and it pays to be kind and polite to nearly everyone, saving the stinging but measured remark for the few who may deserve it. The book is now over a decade old, but the content is timeless. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Martin Amis's Inside Story
TOMORROW: My Book World | F. Langella's Dropped Names
FRIDAY: My Book World | Frank Langella's Dropped Names
FRIDAY: My Book World | Frank Langella's Dropped Names
My Book World Berg, A. Scott. Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. New York: Dutton, 1978. As distinguished editor and later editor-in-chief and vice president for the famed Scribner’s and Sons, Maxwell E. Perkins was probably more of a priest than five out of ten clergy. Though a skeptical secularist, he was nonetheless a great humanitarian with regard to writers and his writers in particular. Unlike today, when writers can only access editors of the big publishing houses by way of an agent (transoms nailed shut for some time now), he would sit down with the majority of people who just showed up at the Scribner offices with manuscript in hand. He would read the MS right away and almost as fast, if he accepted it, would outline what the writer needed to do to shape the story into a workable novel. Author Berg cites writer after writer—from Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe to others not as successful—who claim that without Perkins his or her book would not have been possible; indeed, entire careers would not have been possible. Smart people who knew their material would see what he was after right away and get the corrections (sometimes months later) back to him, and he would reward them both with his genuine affection and with more material concerns. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in particular, did not manage his money well. He and his wife lived lavishly when they had money and Scott would show up at Perkins’s door when they didn’t. Max would lend Scott money from Scribner’s. He would even provide loans from his personal funds. He was quite professorial in that he would take home a brief case full of MSS on the weekend and not only read them all but write perhaps a thirty-page letter to the author about what needed to be done. Essentially, though this book develops the family and friends of Max Perkins, it is mostly about the writers whom he edited. They became what we would call today extended family members: uncles to his children, he a father to his young writers like Tom Wolfe, brother-in-arms with hosts of writers, including females whom he championed in a manner that other editors did not (although he was also accused of being a misogynist). Though the book is certainly not a how-to, the reader might be able to pick up any number tips from Perkins’s brand of editing: —Perkins takes fourteen of Hemingway’s stories and arranges them “to space the strongest pieces at the beginning, middle, and end, varying the rest of the contents by alternating stories of different qualities back to back” (109). —Perkins, for Tom Wolfe, writes out a twelve-point prescription for revisions, suggestions such as, “Cut out references to previous books and to success,” “Intersperse jealousy and madness scenes with more scenes of dialogue with woman,” or “Fill in memory of childhood scenes much more fully with additional stories and dialogue” (237). —About developing plot, Perkins says, “A deft man may toss his hat across the office and hang it on a hook if he just naturally does it, but he will always miss if he does it consciously. That is a ridiculous and extreme analogy, but there is something in it” (447). Though this book came out in 1978 it still seems fresh, mostly because its subject’s life continues to shine as sort of beacon for all writers. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Frank Langella's Dropped Names
TOMORROW: My Book World | S. Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of Genius
FRIDAY: My Book World | S. Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of Genius
FRIDAY: My Book World | S. Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of Genius
My Book World Trethewey, Natasha. Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.
The author’s mother was African-American, and her father was a white Canadian. When they divorce, Natasha’s mother marries a black man, who does all he can to diminish Natasha and her mother. The author not only relies on her memories, which she hides from herself for a long time, but also court case documents and audiotapes, as well as the testimony of others, to write a moving and affecting memoir of her mother’s murder by Trethewey’s stepfather. A true poet in action because every sentence is as lyrical as a line from poetry. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Scott Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of Genius
TOMORROW: My Book World | Natasha Trethewey's Memorial Drive
When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble. FRIDAY: My Book World | Natasha Trethewey's Memorial Drive
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Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
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