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

Publishing Scandals

So James "The Man Who Conned Oprah" Frey may not have as much time in prison as he claims in his best-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces.  And JT Leroy, the troubled publishing darling behind Sarah, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, and Harold's End is just about definitively unmasked as both a 40-year old "unfullfilled" musician (actually half of the couple who claimed to take him in and save him from a life of prostitution and drug addiction) and a young "actress" (actually the sister of the other half of said couple) in her mid-twenties.  It's all good.

Links: the smoking gun, gawker, powells (books), nyt

Rabbit Ears

cHave been squirreling my way through Best American Short Stories 2005 for awhile now and finally read Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals,” originally published in Conjunctions. Believe the hype! Beautiful, funny, unsettling, haunted. Part ghost story, part Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, part family drama. Perfectly captures the mayhem, chaos, and weird systems (children performing inventories of grass and burying armadillo purses full of precious objects; all the things you come to believe together about objects and stories that no one else sees) that make up family life. Plus, impossible not to fall in love with a piece that as Link writes “owes a debt especially to the short stories of the late Joan Aiken.” It’s the sort of thing you finish, then pick up and start all over within the hour.

Marie Antoinette

I just finished reading Kathryn Davis's Versailles, a work (not quite a novel perhaps, something different, but then, maybe a novel) mostly told from the point-of-view of Marie Antoinette.  Davis's voice is so clear and singular, I can't think of anything I've read like it.  She writes so beautifully of all the material things , both glittering and simple, that make up Antoinette's world at Versailles, and somehow it's through these recitations of objects that Davis makes us feel empathy for the queen. Which calls the whole thing into question.  Who among us could resist such beauty, if it were ours, she seems to ask?

You can read an excerpt of Davis's forthcoming novel The Thin Place.

Short

I've been reading lots of short stories, because I'm in a fiction writing class these days.  We're required to read things out of the 2005 Pushcart Prize anthology.  I also just read "Hills Like White Elephants" by Hemingway, because someone in my class wrote an homage.  I don't like Hemingway very much.  If anyone has any suggestions about good collections, please let me know.  It looks like Michael Chabon edited Best American Short Stories 2005. (due out next month).  Short stories are very hard to write, alas.

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.

A Doom of One's Own

I’m back from vacation and illness and in-laws and more vacation. I’m going to try to be a good blogger for several weeks in a row, make things look pretty around here, link to the things I actually like, and make things work a little bit more like a library. Then I will have earned the right to remind all of you of the existence of this site. The good news is that during my prolonged silence, I was reading lots and lots of things.

I’ll start by talking about Unless by Carol Shields, a novel I really, really loved, about a woman whose daughter Nora drops out of college, breaks up with her boyfriend, and starts sitting on a Toronto street corner with a sign that says “Goodness” hanging around her neck, silently begging. This unraveling breaks her mother’s heart, in the classic sense, and much of the book, written while Shields was struggling with the cancer that eventually claimed her life, concerns the nature of grief. Everyone tries to figure out why Nora, went off the deep end – was she triggered by a traumatic event, or was it the more gradual realization of her own powerlessness, as a young woman in a society whose entire framework is still dominated by the experiences of men? In the end, every one and no one are right, and Shields manages to create a truly feminist novel of accurate and beautiful complexity. Around the same time, I read “Holy Fem-bot, Batman!” by Rebecca Traister, an article in Salon about the very public unraveling of Katie Holmes in the early days of her engagement to Tom Cruise that, well, broke my heart. Katie may not be a vagrant (not yet anyway) but her proclamations of goodness, happiness, and love for all things Cruise seem more and more unhinged. Was it a $10 million contract (a friend of a friend of a relation knows Katie and says yes!), a scientology brainwashing, a Hollywood power play, or some genuinely messed-up love? I predict it will be years before we really know how it all went down, but in the interim, it’s no longer so fun to watch the beautiful, seemingly fairly intelligent Holmes turn her personality over to a self-loathing, domineering know-it-all. I’m not sure I agree with Traister, who posits that all of us who willingly ingest the story of her transformation are somehow complicit, but when I see TomKat coverage now, my stomach often gives a little lurch, before I hold my nose and scarf it down.

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).