Word Blur

In Which, Finally, I Finish a Book

Finished reading Everyman by Phillip Roth, a little slip of a book. It was my first Roth and I was blown away by the precision and economy of the prose. It was just magnificent.  In all honesty, the content – the story, the character – didn’t propel me greatly, I was just seduced by the language over and over again. What I really want to read now is American Pastoral, which I understand to be written in the same, spare “late Roth” style, but which sounds somehow meatier. 

This was a book club book, so I’m really curious to see how people respond to it. Our book club discussions are very driven by the story: Did you like this character? Did you understand his actions? What do you think he was getting at when he said such and such? It’s a really fun way of talking about books, and not always one I’m used to.  I wonder how it will apply to a work like this, where the protagonist is drawn with such purposeful ambiguity. There is no question that we feel empathy for him as a reader, but we don’t necessarily like him. I'm not sure how he'll go over, our Everyman.

More Screw

I forgot to mention how much The Turn of the Screw reminded me of Kelly Link's amazing short story, "Stone Animals."  Not an accident, I'm sure.

Also, if memory serves, the fabulous Edward Gorey also nurtured a distaste for Henry James.  As Gorey also liked Trollope and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I feel I'm in excellent company.

Turning the Screw

Henry James has a bit of a mean streak.  I just finished The Turn of the Screw early this morning.  I enjoyed it more than I had other works of James'.  Actually, I've only made it through Daisy Miller, which was required reading in high school, but I've tried about five other novels, some of them multiple times, only to be turned off by the sadism and pervading sense of doom.  And something about the roundaboutness of the prose, although doubtless many a more erudite person would disagree with me on that point.

It reminded me a little of Wilkie Collins and actually was a nice to compliment to all the John Dickson Carr I've been reading, because although Carr always has a watertight real world solution his atmosphere more often than not is one of the supernatural and the dreadful.  But the awful cruelty of that last note!  Wilkie and John would not end there.

Since this was a book club selection that was chosen for its prominent appearance in an episode of Lost, I will comment only so far as to say that there is certainly a thematic congruence, if not a clearly discernable relevance.  After reading this, I do not hold out much optimism for the fate of young Walt (Who actually is probably like 21 now, right?  I mean, the actor.)

Thetan Days

Having finished all the original Miss Seton mysteries I was still drawn to the thrill of corpse literature like a scientologist to the thetans.  Or is that the other way around?  Katie, that was a test.  So I picked up a couple of John Dickson Carr novels, remembering the few I had read as very British, very Golden Age, and very plotty.

The thing about Miss Seton is that Carvic discovered fairly early on that’s it’s more fun for the readers if they know who the criminals are and what they’re up to – that way we get to revel in hilarious hijinks as she unwittingly thwarts their master plans.  Entertaining it is, suspenseful it is not.

Carr is all suspense.  Tight impossible plots with lots and lots of indecipherable hints.  Eccentric larger than life detective/academics.  Country house murders.  Romantic entanglements.  You know the drill.  Now I can’t stop, even though I’m supposed to be reading The Turn of the Screw for my book club (it’s a Lost thing).  The good thing, or the bad thing, is that between Carr and Carter Dickson (a pen name) there are about a million of these novels, most of which I’ve never read.

Anyway, Carr had a fascinating life.  He was an American, but he doesn’t attach that phony weight to all things British that contemporary American mystery writers seem to fall prey to (still not listening, Elizabeth George?  Hmph!).  And his last novel was a historical mystery called The Hungry Goblin, “starring Wilkie Collins.”  I ask you, could it get any better?

Truth and Beauty

I read Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett’s memoir about her friendship with Lucy Grealy, quite some time ago now. This was actually something I read with my book club and the discussion it engendered was revealing. People had intense reactions to Lucy (her troubles, her demands, her neediness), which probably means that her character was strongly drawn. The language was beautiful, heartbreaking, haunting, and all those other things you expect me to say next. It’s interesting, because you know, Lucy Grealy had this incredibly moving and fascinating life: she suffered and survived cancer through much of her childhood; she endured countless surgeries to reconstruct the portion of her face the cancer had eaten away at; she wrote her own poetry and bestselling memoir about this; and she went on to experience both fame and drug addiction. No shortage of story there, for her or those close to her – but how does one shape the events of a life into a narrative, and in so doing, when do you get to stop telling the truth as you experienced it in favor of just the truth? This seemed, in my reading at least, to be the central question of the work.

The Biggest Book Club

There was an interesting tiny article in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education about the practice that many colleges and universities have of assigning summer reading (I won't bother linking to it, because the Chronicle has really limited online access). It seems that Smith students were recently asked to read Diane Gilliam Fisher’s Kettle Bottom, a volume of poetry about West Virginia coal miners ca. 1920. Apparently poetry hardly ever makes these summer reading lists. I love the idea of large scale reading assignments. I’m fascinated by one-book community reading programs, in which a whole state or city forms a giant book club around a single work on an annual basis. Vermont READS  is promoting Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman for 2005, so I really ought to add that to my list.

The Photograph

I read The Photograph by Penelope Lively over the weekend, my first book club book.  It was good, full of clear frank satisfying prose.  At one point Lively describes the main character’s experience in archives as a “blizzard of paper,” which seemed just exactly right.  The book is suspenseful, even though you can feel the dénouement building for so long that when it comes it just feels like the end.  I think that was purposeful though – by the time you get there it’s quite obvious.  In short, the book is the story of a landscape historian who discovers a photograph indicating that his late wife had carried on an affair.  Applying the technique of his craft, he mines the past for details.

I was terrified I would hate it and show up at book club feeling like a big jerk (maybe they all hated it and I’ll end up feeling like a simpleton).  I was explaining to my friend Anne over the weekend that I hoped joining a book club would encourage me to read more contemporary fiction.  In future when people speak of The Corrections (or its current equivalent) perhaps I will no longer have to counter with discussions of lesser-known Wilkie Collins novels that interest next to no one.  Actually, I do really want to read Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days as soon as I can get my hands on it (without paying, meaning as soon as it makes its way back into one of the several libraries I haunt on a semi-regular basis).

My Favorites

I joined a book club, in which I have yet to participate, but I was asked to compile a list of my favorite books.  This was hard.  Is a book your favorite because of how important the circumstances you read it in were (Moon Crossing Bridge, read it to my grandmother on her deathbed), because you remember really loving it at the time (Sentimental Education, can barely recall the plot now, May/December almost-romance?), because you read it more times than anything else as a kid (The Westing Game, although I think I read this about 100 times over the course of just a few short months or weeks), because it's an entirely guilty pleasure (Bridget Jones), or because the information therein somehow represents who you are/were at a critical stage in life (Terpsichore in Sneakers)?  Things I learned: a) I'm not that keen on poetry these days, b) I am a huge fan of children's fantasy literature, but won't tolerate the same genre for adults, and c) I really need to read some contemporary fiction.

Here's the list:

Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret by Judy Blume

His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis

The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander

The Dark is Rising (series) by Susan Cooper

The Westing Game by Ellen Ranskin

Harry Potter (series) by J. K. Rowling

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding

Can You Forgive Her? By Anthony Trollope

Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

Giovanni’s Room, Go Tell it On the Mountain, & Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone by James Baldwin

Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Mrs. Dalloway & To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Persuasion & Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert

The Sound and the Fury & Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner

Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles

Vanity Fair by William Thackery

Moon Crossing Bridge by Tess Gallagher

Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 by Alice Echols

Faithfull by Marianne Faithfull

Please Kill Me: An Uncensored History of Punk edited by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

Terpsichore in Sneakers by Sally Bates