Story Time

It's always nice to have someone read to you, especially when it's a writer you admire. The special treat of The New Yorker:Fiction podcast is that the reader, a New Yorker fiction writer, chooses a story that was published in the magazine and that he or she particularly admires. After the reading, the writer and fiction editor Deborah Treisman discuss the story and its author. Sometimes I know the author well; I may even remember having read the story. But at other times it's a revelation.

That's what happened in January when Joseph O'Neill, who wrote the wonderful novel Netherland, read Muriel Spark's short story “The Ormolu Clock”, originally published in the New Yorker in 1960. The story was terrific and O'Neill's admiration for her technique and her 'nastiness' made me enjoy it even more. Spark is best known for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, but I wanted to try one of her less known works, so I settled on The Girls of Slender Means.

The 'girls' are living in London in the spring of 1945 in an Edwardian mansion called the May of Teck Club, which “exists for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means”. Somehow Spark manages to make this large cast of women of different ages, experience and ambitions into fully realized characters, as they were in 1945 and as they are when she revisits them many years later. In the early chapters the tone is light and droll, as when she describes one resident: “she lolled in the distinct attitude of being the only woman present who could afford to loll”. But she subtly weaves a darker thread into the story, and a tragedy ultimately colors many of their lives.

I'm not sure I liked this book as much as I liked the short story on the podcast, but may that's because I like being read to by an Irishman.

Life's a Mess

Life doesn't run smoothly when you're a character in an Andre Dubus III story. In his earlier novel, "House of Sand and Fog", he sent his characters on collision courses with each other, with disastrous results. His latest work, Dirty Love, is a collection of four stories, somewhere between long short stories and short novelllas. The setting is a small New England coastal town. His characters all yearn for love, but they make desperate choices and are often their own worst enemies.

These stories are not for readers who like characters they can admire. I often wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake hard. But Dubus's talent is to make them so vividly real, so desperate and vulnerable and frightened by their choices, that I was never tempted to judge them. And in each story the characters are left with a flickering of hope that they might yet sort out the mess in their lives.

Worth a Second Look

I'm taking another run at Denis Johnson. I tried before with “Tree of Smoke” and I just couldn't get out of the starting blocks. Maybe I just wasn't ready to tackle a Viet Nam novel, and somehow it seemed so very male. I gave up early. But I always feel a little guilty when I abandon a book. So when I saw Johnson's new novella Train Dreams (short read!) I decided to try again. I'm so glad I did.

The story is simple (and still quite male) – it follows the life of Robert Grainier, an orphaned boy who works on logging crews in the Northwest in his youth, loses his wife and child to a wildfire, and lives out his life in a remote cabin in Idaho where his only company is wolves, coyotes and the sound of the train's whistle as it passes through the valley two miles below him. He makes a modest living using his horse cart for hauling, and rides the train to Bonners Ferry when he's in need of supplies or human contact.

Doesn't sound like much of a story? In Johnson's hands it becomes a spare, honest portrait of a man's life. Grainier's existence is basic, but his connection to nature is powerful and profound, and Johnson slips effortlessly from the simple declarative sentences that describe Grainier's unadorned life, including the occasional humorous encounter with an odd assortment of characters peculiar to the isolated West, to the evocative dream-like descriptions of his experience of the force and mystery of the natural world.

You can read this entire book on a plane ride or on a rainy afternoon. I hope you will find it as powerful and absorbing as I did.

Three From a Master

Anita Desai has been an acclaimed fiction writer for nearly fifty years, and I'm embarrassed to say that the only Desai book I have ever read is by her daughter Kiran (“The Inheritance of Loss”). So her latest book of three novellas – The Artist of Disappearance – seemed a good place to start.

The three stories, all set in India, have no characters or settings in common, but they deal in different ways with the same theme – the survival of art in a world where traditional and modern cultures clash. In each story a member of the modern community is exposed to art (and in two cases an artist) from a more rural or traditional milieu, and is forced to make decisions about its fate.

Desai lets these stories unfold slowly, painting the fascinating landscapes of rural India as she subtly fills in her characters' complexities. I liked all three stories but I was especially moved by “Translator Translated” in which a mediocre university professor finds new richness in her life when she translates a work by an obscure author she admires, but then must face the consequences when her ambition distorts her judgment.

Desai asks hard questions and gives no simple answers. Her prose is lucid, understated and a pleasure to read.

The Unreliable Narrator

Why did I think Julian Barnes was a difficult read? I don't remember much about “Flaubert's Parrot”, but I seem to remember that I struggled to get through it. So I approached his latest book The Sense of an Ending with some trepidation. But it had just won the Booker prize and was only 176 pages long, so I decided to try him again.

I could have read this book in one big gulp. The first section is a coming of age story, as Tony Webster recounts his memories of his high school and college days – his youthful friendships and his first romance - “In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives.”

In the second section an unexpected letter causes sixty-something Tony to look back on his life and re-examine his memories - “we live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time”. Sorry to keep quoting, but Barnes puts things so succinctly that there's no point in paraphrasing. Tony struggles to unravel the mystery that the letter presents, and in the process he must deal with his own delusions and guilt. 

 

This is a book about how our memories shape us and how they deceive us, how our emotions color our interpretations of events. Barnes does a masterful job of creating a character who is forced to spin his memories over and over before they finally show him the truth.

Hills of Virginia

Josh Weil was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and according to his bio he now “divides his time between New York City and a cabin in southwestern Virginia, where he is at work on a novel”. It's easy to tell that he has a strong connection to the rugged hill country between Virginia and West Virginia where the three novellas of The New Valley take place. The remoteness and stark beauty of the landscape seem to color the lives of each of the main characters. These are isolated men trying to make human connections, and their stories are sometimes amusing but more often haunting and heartrending.

There's something reminiscent of Ron Carlson or Daniel Woodrell in his powerful descriptions of decent but inarticulate men and unforgiving nature, but some of Weil's characters are unconventional enough to remind me a little of Flannery O'Connor. Make no mistake, these are not upbeat tales. Not recommended for readers who like uplifting endings, but I look forward to reading the novel that emerges from that remote cabin.

A Little Jewel

I'm always looking for book ideas, so when I stumbled onto a link to Time magazine summer reading recommendations from 23 authors (Pack Your (Book) Bag) I was happy to explore it. Some recommendations were for books not yet published, some were for books I'd already read, some just didn't appeal to me.

But Deborah Eisenberg's choice of Skylark, written by  Hungarian writer Dezso Kosztolanyi in 1924, was really intriguing. Here's her description: “On the surface, it seems very simple and local, the story of a homely girl in a small Hungarian town, but it is electrifying, hilarious and unbelievably painful. It encapsulates just about all of human experience, like a magic diorama you enter that becomes absolutely real and endless.”

I completely agree. This poignant short novel, covering a week in the life of a simple family, reaches from comedy to tragedy and touches universal themes so subtly and honestly that I was overwhelmed. If you're interested, don't read anything else about it, just dive in and let it carry you.

PS: You've probably all experienced earworms, those annoying commercial jingles or cheesy sitcom themes that won't leave your brain. Lucky me. My earworm for the past ten days has been the beautiful Hoagy Carmichael/Johnny Mercer jazz classic “Skylark”. Check it out on iTunes – Carmen McCrae and Tony Bennett have great classic versions, beautiful instrumentals by Wynton Marsalis and Art Blakey, and k.d. Lang's version is a knockout.

Remembering The Eighties

I've been reading Ann Beattie for thirty years. I can still remember, in the long ago 80's, scanning the table of contents when my New Yorker arrived to see if it included one of her short stories. I'd wait until the kids were asleep, then reward myself with a good read. Her characters were often confused or uncertain, her style was spare and understated, and I always felt that I recognized the world she described. The fact that she is around my age and was born and raised in my hometown may have added to my feeling that we were from the same tribe, although her contingent led far more interesting lives than I did.

In her latest novel (more like a novella) Walks With Men, Beattie revisits the 80's with the story of a twenty-one year old woman who falls for an older man who promises that he will teach her everything she needs to know about men and life in general. (Would that have appealed to me when I was in my twenties? Maybe?). Although some of his advice (“When you travel to Europe, never wear a fragrance from the country you're in; Wear only raincoats made in England.”) seems laughable, Jane is fascinated, and leaves her boyfriend Ben (who later changes his name to Goodness) and their communal life on a farm in Vermont to live with Neal in Manhattan.

Beattie is known for her minimalist style, and her characters' motivations sometimes seem inexplicable, but I still wished I knew a little more about why Jane made the choices she did. Nonetheless, I love Beattie's ability to reveal characters through tiny flashes of dialog or observation. As in many of her short stories, the ending is unexpected, leaves questions unanswered, but is oddly satisfying.

Confession

I decided it was time that I tried to tackle Roberto Bolaño. Actually this is my second attempt. I started “The Savage Detectives” but it was too confusing and overwhelming. So this time I started small with his novella By Night in Chile. The entire book is the deathbed rant of Father Sebastien Urrutia, a Chilean priest, poet and literary critic.

This book is hard to put down for two reasons. The first is the practical one – since there are no chapter or paragraph breaks it's hard to pick up where you left off. But the more powerful reason is that it picks you up and sweeps you along as Sebastien revisits his past. At first his reminiscences are about literary evenings with Chilean writers and intellectuals, most notably poet Pablo Neruda. But then he meets the mysterious figures Mr. Etah and Mr. Raef (surely the backwards spelling of their names is no accident), who generously send him on a trip to Europe to study the deterioration of churches. In his travels he discovers that the main cause of the damage is pigeon droppings, and that the elegant solution employed European priests is falcons, which swoop down from steeple tops to bloody and kill their prey. What a surreal image.

Urrutia returns to Chile in time to witness the Allende government (he studies Greek classics and keeps a low profile) and the Pinochet coup (he instructs Pinochet and his generals in the basic tenets of Marxism). He eventually confesses to having attended literary evenings at the home of a glamorous hostess (he claims the visits were “infrequent” although we sense this is not the truth), not knowing, or perhaps ignoring, the brutal interrogations of political dissidents taking place in her basement.

Sometimes Bolaño's prose read like poetry, with a rhythm that carries you along with its urgency. At other times Urrutia's self-justifying confession is a biting satiric condemnation of the silence of the intellectual elite. It's a book that needs to be read in big gulps. I may have to try "The Savage Detectives" again.

Western Love

Good news – another Ron Carlson book has arrived. Our Book Club recently read and loved his “Five Skies” - spare but elegant prose, beautifully rendered characters, wonderful descriptions of the stark beauty of the western landscape. Does The Signal deliver more of the same? It does.

As before, we have a strong but damaged man. This time his name is Mack, and his struggles to hold on to his family's Wyoming ranch have led him to crime and alcohol, and have cost him his marriage. Now he has a chance for some semblance of peace and redemption. His ex-wife Vonnie has agreed to take one last fishing trip with him in the mountains, a trip they have taken each September for ten years. But Mack has another motive. He is secretly receiving a signal on his hidden Blackberry that may lead him to a piece of equipment his shady employer wants to recover. Carlson doesn't reveal much detail about this mission, but as the trip progresses the tension mounts, and the book becomes both the examination of a failed marriage and a terrifying thriller.

What can I say about Carlson's prose? One critic calls him “Hemingway without the misogyny and self-parody”. He has wonderful descriptions of the Wind River range, a glacier-carved mountain range in central Wyoming (I was there once and can attest to its stark beauty). Through flashbacks he shows us how Mack got to where he is. These include understated but emotional scenes with his father, whose sudden death still haunts Mack, and warm and funny scenes of his early romance with Vonnie. Does it pack the wallop that “Five Skies” did for me? Maybe not quite. The characters are a little less complex and nuanced, the plot a little more revved up. But I'm nitpicking. Ron Carlson's taut, elegant writing is a joy to read.

Married Life

I'm back to Tolstoy's line again - “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way“. If you substitute 'marriage' for 'family' it might seem to apply just as well. Phillip Lopate's Two Marriages consists of two novellas about married couples who, other than their common setting of Brooklyn, could not be more different.

The first story, “The Stoic's Marriage”, is written as a series of journal entries made by Gordon, a pudgy forty-something bachelor who discovers love with the beautiful Rita, an attractive Filipino whom he meets when she becomes the home health aide to his dying mother. His early entries rhapsodize about Rita's perfection, but as the months roll on things become much more complicated. You've heard of the 'unreliable narrator'. I guess I would categorize Gordon as the clueless narrator. The reader figures out long before he does that Rita may not be all that she seems. But Gordon plugs on confidently, explaining his hilariously cockeyed theories as to why Rita's motives are pure. His relentless stoicism in the face of all his setbacks is amusing and heartwarming.

In the second story “Eleanor, or, The Second Marriage” we meet Eleanor and Frank (a play on the Roosevelts?) who seem to be the couple who have everything. They live in a large Brooklyn brownstone, hold satisfying jobs, and have a circle of interesting friends. This is the second marriage for both, and they pride themselves on having evolved into partners who can truly love and understand each other. The story takes place over the course of a July weekend during which they hold an impromptu dinner party for an assortment of friends and family. Eleanor prepares a “simple meal” involving individual Cornish game hens, a zucchini vegetable terrine, wild rice with scallions and cranberries, hors d'oeuvres, hot biscuits and sun-dried-tomato bread, mesclun salad, Greek olives, chutneys, cheeses and two desserts. It's hard not to hate her, isn't it? I'm hoping the desserts were store-bought.

By the time Monday morning dawns, it is clear that Eleanor and Frank are really not much better than Gordon in understanding the workings of a marriage. All their sophistication doesn't save them from its pitfalls; if Gordon asks too few questions, Frank asks too many. Lopate does a masterful job in these two disparate tales of showing the many and varied difficulties of married life.

Confession

When you buy a used book you hold an object with a history you will never know. How many people have held and read this book before you, and what was going on in their lives as they read it? I asked myself those questions when I opened a used copy of The All of It by Jeannette Haien. Here's the inscription I found on the inside cover: “Hannilie – This is a quince of a book – one of a kind like Isak Dinesen's. I hope the hurting has stopped & that you can savour this timeout. Pick”. Wow! First of all, what kind of names are Hannilie and Pick? How can a book be like a quince? And was Hannilie hurting because Pick had just dumped her (euphemistically known as a “timeout”), or was she taking time off from work to recover from foot surgery and her loyal friend Pick was providing her with reading material? And did she in fact “savour” this book?

Well... she might have. This slim volume (145 pages) is really a long short story. And 'story' is definitely the right word for it, since the bulk of the book is the story that widow Enda Dennehy tells Father Declan as they sit by the body of her late husband Kevin in the remote village of Roonatellin on the western coast of Ireland, where the couple has lived for over 50 years. Except that Kevin is not her husband. He has revealed this secret to the priest on his deathbed, but it is left to Enda to tell “the all of it” as they sit through a long afternoon waiting for mourners to arrive. Bracketing Enda's story is another one that at first seems unrelated. Father Declan is attempting to catch a fish. It's a cold rainy day, the midges are biting, and the priest is using every lure in his arsenal to try to land a salmon. His reverie as he fishes leads us into Enda and Kevin's story, and near the book's end we are returned to the priest on the riverbank. He struggles to balance his sympathy for Enda with his need to condemn her sin.

Haien's style is subtle and elegant. She asks hard questions about what it means to lead a moral life, and about what compromises life can impose. There is also much humor in the book, and beautiful descriptions of rugged coast of County Mayo. I don't know what “hurting' Hannilie was hoping to escape, but I think this book has the subtle power to distract her from pains, whether physical or emotional.

Unintended Consequences

This is not a book to read while taking public transportation or in any other circumstance in which laughing out loud would be an embarrassment. A description of the book cannot begin to convey the enjoyment that lies in store. The book is small (literally, 5 x 7) and short (120 pages, practically double-spaced) – really two hours max if you are a slow reader as I am. But – to the point.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett tells the story of a fictionalized Queen of England who, in pursuit of her corgis, strays into a traveling bookmobile and the rest, as they say, is history. Or in this case, reading. Aided and abetted by a member of the kitchen staff, the Queen gives sway to a hitherto undeveloped passion for reading with unanticipated (her prime minister would say untoward) consequences. There are many literary references to authors and books (some familiar, others not) including a fictionalized meeting with Alice Munro; some insights into the life of a monarch; and some very profound observations about the delight, the purpose and value of reading. "Can there be a greater pleasure...than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen."

I wonder if the real Queen of England finds this book so enjoyable. I guarantee that you as a lover of reading will.