Word Blur

I Can't Believe it's Not Proust!

Recently read: My Lucky Star, a novel that’s part Wodehouse homage, part gay chick lit (a term I have always taken simply to mean “highly derivative of Bridget Jones Diary“), and part House of Barrymore.  It came recommended and while it was lighter than an Olsen twin’s body mass index, it was also wicked funny.  Not for the faint of heart: the unraveling involves a closeted megastar getting caught on film in flagrante delicto with a masseuse costumed as the Oscar statuette.

Pretty

I read a beautiful book awhile back: Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. I thought it was pretty nearly perfect, but some of my book group cohorts thought it was too bleak. Actually, for a book about an ex-model succumbing to the ravages of hepatitis while replaying her memories of a friend who died of AIDS, I felt it had a surprisingly hopeful quality. Mostly though, the writing was just, as they say, luminous. Simple, stark, real.

I dug up a bunch of Mary Gaitskill interviews afterwards:
http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/14988/
http://www.altx.com/int2/mary.gaitskill.html
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/writers/writerdetails.asp?z=y&cid=973021#interview
http://www.failbetter.com/19/GaitskillInterview.htm
http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/books/interview_marygaitskill/

:(? :)?

A Finnish novel called The Last Messages, written entirely in text message.

Cloudy water and fake writers

We’re still living at my mom’s, waiting for the water in our collapsed well to run clean (the well guy told us it could take three weeks). My eldest daughter has moved into a "house" resembling an opium den under the dining room table. The only thing I find annoying about this is the fact that she got there first. Pretty much unrelated, except for the general concept of make believe, is The Night Listener, by Armistad Maupin, which I finished a couple of weeks ago. The book is Maupin’s barely fictionalized account of his lengthy relationship with Anthony Godby Johnson, a young writer who endured physical and sexual abuse and was sold into prostitution by his parents, then was adopted by a loving social worker when he finally managed to escape, only to discover he was HIV-positive. Also, he doesn’t exist. Probably. Except as J. T. Leroy’s godparent. Obviously totally up my alley. Even better than the book is this article, since it contains none of Maupin’s boyfriend and daddy issue side plots. All hoax and scandal.

Ooooh, Aaaah

I’m really not sure how to describe Jennifer Egan’s The Keep, which I read last week over the course of a day, with the increasing sense that my life might depend on reaching its conclusion.  I wanted to be there more than anywhere else in the world, more than I wanted to be holding my baby, or watching my husband play Wii Golf (pretty much my only alternative as it turned out).  It's been awhile since I read anything with that sense of urgency.  It was, as Nigella Lawson might say, glorious.  To even begin to discuss the plot is to ruin the experience of falling further and further into the story with each twist of events, each shift in our understanding of just who is speaking to us (and why and when).  It’s one of those books that you don’t want to believe could be as good as all the hype you’ve read about it, that then turns out to be better than all the hype you’ve read about it.  Okay, so there are these two cousins with a savage past and a castle in need of renovations and a baroness and a prisoner.  That’s the beginning.  It seems every other novel rolling off the presses these days is described as “gothic,” but this one really did have a sort of Woman in White page-turning quality to it that's hard to come by honestly.  Running right smack through this post-post-sensation novel is an exploration of voice that convinced me that the writer’s experimentation had paid off (as opposed to making me feel I was doing a lot of extra work as a reader for no good reason), that actually felt new.  I think you should read it.

Truth vs. Fiction

I bought someone a copy of Lydia Davis's novel, The End of the Story, because I enjoyed reading her short story collection Samuel Johnson is Indignant, earlier this year.  I like the starkness and the weirdness of her prose.  So now I'm adding that to my list, because it's ridiculous to give someone something you haven't actually read yourself.  What this means is another book added to the teetering pile that's literally overtaking my bedroom, while what I'm actually reading are the last three books (including The Beatrice Letters) in the Lemony Snicket series.

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.

TV reading

Finally finished Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, falling hard for the title story, which is about a group of teenagers living in a small town in Vermont who are drawn together by their love of a television show called The Library, which may or may not be real and may or may not be magic and is sort of like a cross between Buffy and the works of Rumiko Takahashi.  I'm pretty sure that Kelly Link wrote this story just for me, maybe without knowing it, and that is really is magic.  Also, if anyone knows where to get any episodes of The Library, that would be really, really good.

Zombie Reading

I've been reading more Kelly Link -- her story collection, Magic For Beginners, is way cool.  Although I haven't found anything I love as much as "Stone Animals," I have some runners up that I am quite fond of.  For example:  "The Faery Handbag" starts at the Garment District in Cambridge, MA and quickly moves on to a mythical handbag that contains a whole village.  In Link's stories zombies shop in convenience stores.  The adopted child of a witch is driven by a need for revenge that he can never exactly own.

You can also read something totally new by Kelly Link, for free, online at A Public Space.  It's the classic story about a bigshot guy who makes a return visit to his home town and the girl he left behind.  Only everybody has super powers.  Some people use them to fight crime and get famous, some people just use them to advance the art of striptease.  And there are mutants.  Did I say too much?

You know what else I'm reading?  Endless emails from people I work with around campus that say, "I'll be out of the office from tomorrow until July 7th so let me know if you need anything ASAP" and "Me too!"  I'm thinking about trying to make a mash-up poem, but I'm not sure the language is there to start with.  Hmmm.

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