Word Blur

If some potty catch some potty...

A kindly professor has taken pity on me and is mentoring me through a writing project. In recent weeks he suggested I read “The Laughing Man,” by J. D. Salinger. I fulfilled my duty in this regard of an instant, but then I got paranoid. There is a book, just this one, that I had never read and when anyone found this out they would freak out on me and press copies into my hand with the most fervent urgings and intonations. What was I going to do if this professor wanted to talk to me about The Book?

So at long last I have read The Catcher in the Rye and understand, in more than just a glimmering kind of way, what people mean when they describe a first-person narrator as “a female Holden Caufield for the twenty-first century,” though why people persist in saying this sort of thing is, now more than ever, beyond me.

There is nothing I can tell you about this book that you don’t already know (excepting, perhaps, that I’m sorry I never returned the copy you loaned me when you said it would change my life) save this: my three-year old is being toilet trained and she now refuses to go to the bathroom without being allowed to “read” The Catcher in the Rye. For real.

Wodehouse Medicine

Earlier in the week I had food poisoning. When I started to feel a little better, but not that much better, I lay in bed sorting through all the clothes my kids had recently grown out of and into and so on. That’s one of the endless preoccupations of parenting that no one really mentions ahead of time. The clothes sorting process, particularly if you rely on hand-me-downs, never ends. I had just gotten everything put away in the proper bureaus, storage bins, bags to return to friends, and boxes to drop off at the Salvation Army on Tuesday. On Wednesday my mom handed me a new pile of things she picked up at a sale. Anyway, when I was endlessly sorting pajamas and dresses and socks I listened to an audio recording of Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves.

Anthony Lane wrote a remarkable, critical, heartfelt appreciation of P. G. Wodehouse in the New Yorker some time back that I suggest tracking down if you can. My brain is foggy and I can’t properly explain Wodehouse’s gift for language, but I can recommend it as a tonic for stomach troubles. The lilting affability and dry vacancy of Bertram Wooster are positively medicinal.

Adrian Mole, at last

Yesterday afternoon I was so tired that the corners of the room were turning black and I was falling asleep sitting up, except I couldn’t fall asleep because my two-month old needed to nurse and since it had taken her older sister an hour and a half to go down (as weary caretakers say) at nap it was practically time to wake her up again.

I was at my mother’s house when all this was happening and in my desperate state I turned to her as a sort of reader’s advisor.  She’s amazing at this.  First of all she owns nearly every book ever printed.  She has worked as head of circulation in a public library for many years and when we were growing up she would often call home asking us to leave a book in the mailbox for a patron to pick up, if the library didn’t have it.  You can tell my mother you would like to read something about a spinster living in a small British countryside village (I love you Miss Read!) and she’ll present you with five choices in five minutes. 

I was crammed into the corner of her couch, basically unable to move without upsetting the fragile balance of calm I had established and periodically nodding off when I asked her to bring me a book, any book.  She scanned the situation, no doubt registering the note of exhausted desperation in my voice and immediately brought me five choices.  On the top of the pile was The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend. 

She has been trying to get me to read this book for twenty years (in which period I have received a copy annually on birthdays and Christmases), and I have been resisting it for just as long.  Well no more.  In two seconds I read about 70 pages and by 8:14 this morning it was finished.  At 8:17 I called my mother to concede victory.  Sometimes my mind has to go completely blank before I am able to take her advice.

Adrian’s difficulties are utterly absorbing: Will his sad sack of a father and his philandering mother ever snap to?  Will the horse-loving Pandora wise up to his devotion?  When will the bully Barry Kent quit extorting his paper route earnings?  Will he ever outgrow his spots?

Adrian, alternately insightful, clueless, megalomaniacal, and self-deprecating, is more Bridget Jones than Bridget Jones could ever hope to be.  Move over Pandora; I love him.  Thank the Gods there are sequels.

Trying Not To Think About Michael Douglas

It doesn't help that the last book I finished (Wonderboys) has his picture on the cover.  It took me almost as long to read this book as it took Grady Tripp to write his book within the book, and at times it seemed just as unnecessarily sprawling -- I know, I know, it's that way on purpose -- but than it dawned on me, or maybe I should say it hit me (like a knock out punch): it could be that Michael Chabon is capable of writing some of the most beautiful closing sentences working their way into the literary canon.  And that's something, isn't it?  Plus!  Bonus!  Thoughts of Katie Holmes before It All Went Wrong.

Obsessive Reading

My last really good bout of obsessive reading came when I had a severe back injury that left me more or less bed-ridden for a period of a few months.  I didn't read all the Pulitzer Prize winners, though.  I read (almost) all the works of Miss Read, pretty much identical stories about a teacher in a one-room school house in the British countryside.  I say they were identical, but every once in awhile a family of long-haired hippies moves to the village and causes trouble.  Still, these slight deviations aside, it was heaven.  I guess some people just have higher aspirations than I do.

Now I don't read at all anymore.  If I have free time, I just watch Veronica Mars on DVD.  Because I'm shallow.

Pulitzer Prize story: courtesy of bookslut

The Heart is a Consumer, Above All Things

I get obsessed with stuff really easily – Keanu Reeves, Anthony Trollope, Bruce Lee, Janes Bowles, Sasquatch, whatever.  Anyway, I feel it would take a heart of stone to resist the lure of the whole JT Leroy saga and I eagerly await each new installment.  I may be the only person in America looking forward to the husband’s Vanity Fair article and the Weinstein’s “biopic.”  I have no opinion on the right or wrong of the matter; I just love reading about it.

When Sarah came out I remember feeling guilty: I should want to read it, this redemptive book by a gender queer kid who had suffered such terrible atrocities and hardships, but it seemed – and I’m still embarrassed by this reaction – just so painfully fashionable.  The fact that the person who wrote the book apparently felt much the same way only scratches the surface of my shame, because it could have been true (why not, really?) and then what kind of person would I be?

Anyway, when I checked Gawker's JT Leroy thread on Friday and discovered that there was a new Salon article on the subject, which printed out totaled eleven pages, I was really happy.  Unfortunately, the article adds little to the story, unless what interests you most is Laura Albert’s work in the sex industry.  Still, eleven pages is eleven pages!  So just in case anyone else out there still cares: here’s your eleven pages.

The Happy Brookner

Finished reading The Misalliance by Anita Brookner, which I actually started as a book on tape, but finished in print because I wasn’t spending enough time alone in my car to satisfy the drive (no pun intended) of the narrative. If I was going to discuss anything at length, it would be the ending, but that wouldn’t be very sporting. Instead I’ll simply observe that Brookner has an enormous penchant for small things.  She gives them legs, and like her protagonist, deifies and reifies them.  The Misalliance tells the story of Blanche, whose husband has left her for a younger woman and who seeks comfort in what she perceives to be a good deed.  Over and over again Blanche takes stock of her situation and habits, her observations shifting just a bit with each summation, so that eventually we get a sense of almost rhythmic movement, of a story building in these little repetitive waves.  Neatly done, I say!

Amy Bloom

Last night I continued my quest to understand the anatomy of the short story by reading selections from Amy Bloom's Come to Me, a finalist for the National Book Award.  Bloom is a practicing psychotherapist and her stories tackle big emotional subjects (two of the three stories I've read so far begin immediately after a loved one's funeral) with deceptively simple language.  They read something like the the way people talk, which I've come to appreciate more and more in my advancing years, as I slowly shed my preference for seeing the hand on the page in favor of things quieter and occasionally more truthful.  My mother, the consummate reader, picked this up for me at a library book sale (impossible to discern which one, there have been hundreds -- she always gets me something interesting) and it sat unread, I'm now ashamed to say, in the box of books I intended to donate to my own library's book sale, placed there during the period in which I rarely read anything published after 1900.  Now I'm interested in this Amy Bloom and how and why she writes the way she does.

Chabon, First & Last

Over the summer I read two books by Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, his first, and The Final Solution, his most recent. I haven’t read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or Wonderboys or Summerland, so I suppose that puts me in some ridiculous and obscure category of Chabon readership. I loved The Mysterious of Pittsburgh, which is essentially about the power of nostalgia, even though there are also appearances by mobster relations, library workers/romantic interests, larger-than life alcoholic figures, and cloud factories. I feel like if I say much more I will spoil the experience of reading this book, but I want to somehow express how good Chabon is at freezing that period of time in early adulthood where we construct our identities, just before everything becomes so fixed. I remember thinking that the last sentence, which now completely escapes me, was among the most beautiful I had read in some time. The Final Solution was harder to love with the same abandon. It seemed like more of an exercise, though clearly a brilliant one. The slender book tells the tale of an old, retired detective, who bears a startling resemblance to a post-prime Sherlock Holmes, and a young WWII-era Jewish refugee whose parrot (who may or may not have memorized Nazi codes) disappears under mysterious circumstances. It’s not Chabon’s first genre-dipping exercise (Summerland is a young adult novel), but after having read easily a hundred British detective novels, the mystery itself didn’t engage me much. What was masterful was the characterization of the detective, now a hobbyist beekeeper in the English countryside, whose once quick synapses have been slowed by the indignities of age.