Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (1911)

The tale of a man caught between two women.

Classics Review: Ethan Frome is short but carries within its stark and desperate pages an amazing history of literature in English. Edith Wharton (1862-1937) began writing when her doctor prescribed it as a remedy for her stress -- the opposite prescription to that of the heroine of "The Yellow Wallpaper" (written by Wharton's almost exact contemporary, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)) who is confined to bed doing nothing until she goes mad. Wharton gives her story a framing device parallel to that of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1818-48). We meet our three characters, Frome himself, his older, "crippled," and bitter wife Zeena (Zenobia), and their young servant girl Mattie Silver, living the harsh, wintry, brutal life (both economically and literally) of New England. Wharton's tale of illicit love exists on a plane somewhere between the harsh early-American puritan judgment of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804-64) and the Job-like physical and mental suffering commonly imposed on his protagonists by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Wharton's story, both morality tale and tragedy, moves on to the inexorable poetic justice and punishment (trebly destructive) of its conclusion. There's never a dull moment in this simple tale, each paragraph has its job to to do. Oddly, the tragic flaw of its essentially good eponymous hero, is that as he was submissive to the needs of his crippled parents before they died, he is then too-submissive to the demands of his wife. The reader cannot stop railing at Ethan Frome for failing to stand up for himself. Rather than employ the patriarchal "be a man" (although it occurred to me), I think the proper literary exhortation would be "have some agency, darn you!" But Ethan Frome's only act of agency leads to the self-destruction that fate decreed. Despite the more appealing characters of Mattie and Ethan, the most complex character of the tale is the wife, Zenobia, who has depths to explore as her role changes dramatically for reasons apparently unexplained.  [4½★]

A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes (1957)

Con artists fleece a good, church-going man and all hell breaks loose.

Mystery Review: A Rage in Harlem introduced Chester Himes' tough, no-nonsense police detectives, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, though they only act as supporting players in the novel. Unlike most detective novels, we rarely live in their minds and spend much more time with other characters. The book is well written, cleverly plotted, and fast paced to the point of bedlam. The controlled chaos in A Rage in Harlem is as good as I've ever read. Many authors, even skilled ones, can lose the thread when writing about mayhem and the writing becomes dark and hard to see. But not so with Mr. Himes. He can juggle no end of craziness. Himes also makes 1950's Harlem come alive as Raymond Chandler did with his L.A. backstreets. Although written in 1957, Himes never loses sight of the societal position of his mostly black characters: "Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish ... . That is Harlem." There may be criminals here, and good people tempted to crime, but the why is never far from the page. Recently saw the film, which has the same characters but the plot veers far from the book; worth seeing, enjoyed the visuals, but the book was better. Before Walter Mosely there was Chester Himes, an author who also wrote mysteries which were tough detective stories, who was too little known, too little read. A Rage in Harlem is a brilliant beginning.  [4★]

Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante (1992)

After her mother's unexpected and curious death, a woman searches her hometown for a key to the past.

Book Review: Troubling Love was Elena Ferrante's first novel and she began her writing career talking about mothers and daughters. Taking place after a mother has died, the book is something of a mystery -- as are mothers and daughters. The descriptions and plot are intensely realistic, our narrator recalling the intricacies of her mother's life, until her memories become hallucinations. At that point her mind, and the writing and the reader's understanding, become fantastical, and unclear. Lost within an "aggressive, pleasure-seeking, and sticky realism." Immersed in Naples, the tunnels of Naples where her mother was followed by "peddlers, railway workers, idlers, stonemasons ... often breathing in her ear ... they tried to touch her hair, her shoulders, her arm ... she kept her eyes down and walked faster." Ferrante's powerful, muscular writing is here, fully developed, in her first novel. There are many themes to follow in Troubling Love: one with a significant role is clothing (as on the brilliant cover image). Being about mothers and daughters, this motif really does connect with the well-worn query: "Are you really going out dressed like that?" What is less accomplished is the plot, the continuity. Events tumble over themselves, time stretches and shrinks, the pace changes. Characters don't always seem to act as she's led us to believe. Our narrator has two sisters and both are invisible in a story of family, of mothers and fathers. Despite Ferrante's keen eye and insights, Troubling Love isn't as well constructed as her later novels, it doesn't hang together of a piece, instead hinting at various directions that aren't explored. As if she wanted to do too much, but then sensibly restrained herself. Ferrante's attitudes, issues, thoughts are all here, they're just not as well put together as they needed to be. I wouldn't wish this on her, but I'm curious how she might write the book today. That said, if you enjoy reading Elena Ferrante as I do, this is still Ferrante, it's still her sentences, intelligence, and eye. And hints of the books to come.  [3★]

A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas (1952)

The great Welsh poet shares memories from Christmases past in his own rolling words and tolling voice.

Classics Review: A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas is prose that's poetry, written simply and magically, telling stories from the Christmastime of his youth, just as the title says. Stories of kitchen fires and snowballs, of Uncles falling asleep bellies full, Aunties nipping at the wine, and of haunted caroling, all laced with a dry and straight-faced humor. There is much I miss and fail to understand in these old words, not the least since it was written a long time ago now. Also that it's British, and even more that it's Welsh, being not only other times but other places and people I've never known. Also that A Child's Christmas in Wales is Dylan Thomas with his self-mythic images of "the two-tongued sea" and the "harp-shaped hills." With his pictures of "birds the color of red-flannel petticoats," "fish-freezing waves," "a duchess-faced horse," and bells that "rang their tidings over the bandaged town," while walking through the cold "with taproom noses" as they "huffed and puffed, making ghosts with our breath" under the "silent one-clouded heavens" without even "the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets."  But even if there's much that I don't grasp from A Child's Christmas in Wales, living in our time here and now, I still gain all that wonderful sound and syllable, whether I catch every bit or not. Perhaps these sentiments are sentimental, but all children, wherever they grew up, have the right to remember: "It was always snowing at Christmas."  [5★]

Therese and Isabelle by Violette Leduc (1966)

Two girls in boarding school burn for each other at a white heat.

Book Review: Therese and Isabelle is a story of adolescent love. The first love after infatuation that feels as if there will never be another love, all new in the whole of the world, a feeling never felt before, exhilarating, maddening, addicting, and overwhelming. Where lust and love are inextricably intertwined. Where dying together seems possible, yet every second of life not spent together was wasted and the fear of any future separation becomes obsession ("Her sleep had filled me with despair. 'Don't go! ... Why did I go to sleep? Why?'"). When the immense commitment of love creates the insecurity that it's all for nothing. When drama and tension are part of the emotion. A selfish love. Knowing that one's love of the other is so powerful, so extreme and complete, that any flaw, turn, or hesitation by the other seems to bring the whole crashing down because her love doesn't match in every particular. Violette Leduc writes of this love in Therese and Isabelle, captures it wholly, beautifully. Leduc recognizes the self we put on for the other, the "I" that we want the other to see: "revealing ourselves as actresses to the manner born." The secret mundanity: "Those in love are always standing on the platform of a railway station." When Therese kisses her love who lies asleep: "I was unfaithful to Isabelle with herself, I was depriving her of the kiss that I was giving her." Although most of the book is the fever plaguing the two girls, some story is supplied. After her mother's betrayal by remarrying, Therese "had become a boarder in a boarding school: I had no home." Even apart from the love story, there is always the keen perception of a true writer: "The professorial voices of the masters had lost their winter resonance now that all the classroom windows were open." This may not be erotica, but it's certainly quite sensual. Leduc's awesome success in Therese and Isabelle is to fully capture the feeling of such love and obsession in immense detail, vividly and viscerally. The reader is caught in the pages, in love, in lust, and every moment is real. The novel could be called a slice of life, a small piece, but perfect all the same. N.B. My copy was a small hardback with the author's initials on the cover published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1967, translated from the French by Derek Coltman. The author's biography at the end of the book notes that Therese and Isabelle was "originally intended as a section of La Batarde" (published in 1964), but "was actually first published separately and privately before that work."  [5★]

Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy (1989)

A resident in a girl's boarding school learns about life, despite or because of her sheltered world.

Book Review: Sweet Days of Discipline is the story of a fourteen-year-old girl, written by a woman looking back at age fifty ("years and years have passed and I can still see her face"). Written in a quiet, almost icy manner, everything is seen at a remove. No flaming passions; always control and discipline. Each student in the boarding school builds a facade for the world to see, until a new student arrives, Frederique, who seems beyond that, the perfect student ("she was entire unto herself"). Our narrator "wanted to conquer her ... I had to conquer her." The two become friends, though "even now, I can't bring myself to say I was in love." The friendship is at an almost mystic level, but always restrained: "We never held hands ... there was a kind of fanaticism that prevented any physical expression ... the thought of flesh or sensuality eluded us." At first our narrator is captivated: Frederique "played [piano] with a certain passion"; she "spoke of a man as of a completed parabola." She was "the most disciplined, respectful, ordered, perfect girl, it almost made your flesh creep." The object of her attention is always distant, immaculate, as if from another plane. Although Frederique is the center of Sweet Days of Discipline, she is not the whole and our heroine explores other aspects of life, always coming back to the contradictory complexity of "the pleasure of disappointment ... perhaps they were the best years ... those years of discipline ... there was a kind of elation throughout all those days of discipline." There are also other stories: the stolid German roommate, the beautiful young girl who isn't as beautiful as she thinks she is, the new interest whose "red hair was magnificent," the tragic African girl who withers alone in a strange land far from home. I had to read Sweet Days of Discipline twice to fully appreciate it. The ending came as a surprise, came from nowhere, and I went back to read it again to see that the resolution came from somewhere. On my first reading the novel seemed too little, too much withheld, too superficial, too much allusive and hinting, not enough substance, only suggestion. But on second reading I grasped the whole, restrained, controlled, and distant as it is. In her subtle, muted way Fleur Jaeggy captures something unusual, "The pleasure that comes from obedience. Order and submission, you can never know what fruits they will bear in adulthood."  [4★]

Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee (1980)

The Magistrate of a small outpost at the farthest edge of the Empire confronts the barbarism of his own people.

Book Review: Waiting for the Barbarians is novel about the superior and the inferior, the master and slave, the demeaning and the demeaned, those over and those under. I expected this short novel to be an allegory about the sins of apartheid in the author's native South Africa, but Coetzee is working with a larger canvas, making a broader statement, applicable to any imperialist state, but even more so to any power differential between two groups. And for being written almost four decades ago, Coetzee fully illustrates the realization seen so often in recent years that in attacking those we label barbarians, we become barbarians ("the new barbarians"). We see the sensual and sybaritic Magistrate and his town living in peace with those across the border in a far flung idyll, when his eyes are opened as the Empire (for no apparent reason) flexes its muscle: "I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected there seems to be no recovering ... the knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end." We see his sensuality awkwardly transformed into an ineffectual attempt to make amends to a crippled barbarian woman. Eventually, his "dreams of becoming an unthinking savage" are more palatable than remaining part of his own "civilization." The Magistrate realizes that "what has become important above all is that I should neither become contaminated by the atrocity that is about to be committed nor poison myself with the impotent hatred of its perpetrators." As he states: "Empire dooms itself ... to plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end ... how to prolong its era ... by night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision." All of this, still so relevant today.

The writing is also wonderfully perceptive, Coetzee is an intelligent and talented writer, perhaps taking his lesson from some morsel of Kafka, such as "An Imperial Message." When reading, note how often the sun is described and designated, a signpost for what is embodied in the scene. As Virginia Woolf used clocks and time in Mrs. Dalloway, so Coetzee uses the sun in Waiting for the Barbarians. In the narrative the Magistrate, imperfect as he is, pays for his complicity with his own immense physical pain the whole described as an "empire of pain," and Christ-like images abound. Coetzee is writing of time and history, and like history he leaves us with a little scrap of hope at the end. For Coetzee is carefully and determinedly didactic, he knows he's writing meaningful and literary fiction, and doesn't try to keep his prestidigitation secret. The little story told here is taken from a much wider world as when using phrases like "peace in our time" and "barbarian-lover." He's writing for someone more intellectual or educated than I am. Although I get the big picture, I'm sure there's numerous points I missed. My greatest fault with Waiting for the Barbarians is a purely personal bias, and if I may, a small rant. That flaw is Coetzee's use of dreams. All readers know that literary dreams, those fabricated by an author, are nothing like the dreams of people in real life, are not believable (I'm excepting dreams that take the reader to another, otherwise inaccessible world). We are not even expected to find them credible. The reader is always aware that the author is trying to stick in some meaning, some symbolism, some foreshadowing or gloss on what is going on. Describing a character's dreams, those artificial, carefully constructed authorial tools, are the easiest, cheapest, and most obvious of an author's tricks. Perhaps this wasn't so in 1980 ... I don't know. But for me, at least, they damaged the story in their frequent use, repetition, and disturbance of the narrative. Rant done. Waiting for the Barbarians is an important and thoughtful work on a timeless subject, as significant now as when it was written.  [3½★]

Coraline by Neil Gaiman (2002)

A young girl (small for her age) explores an old house and discovers that all is not as it seems.

Book Review: Coraline is a children's adventure story with a bit of the scary and a talking cat. The book updates old folk or fairy tales ("Hansel and Gretel" comes to mind) and is something like a modernization of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865): as wondrous as Wonderland was, there was no microwave pizza in the court of the Queen of Hearts. Sadly, I had trouble making myself six again to fully appreciate this, though I'm sure I'd have trouble with a phrase such as "ghastly parody" (I appreciated that Neil Gaiman doesn't talk down to his audience). The tone of the book is perfect for reading to children and Coraline is a true and worthy hero, a brave and determined explorer who thinks of others. If I'd first read Coraline when younger I know I'd appreciate it even more.  [3½★]

A Spy in the House of Love by Anais Nin (1954)

A woman seeks to live with the freedom of a man in 1950's New York.

Book Review: A Spy in the House of Love is the fourth book written in Anaïs Nin's continuous novel sequence, "Cities of the Interior" (the novels can be read in any order, "continuous" in the sense of a circle). The three central female characters in these books embody the primal elements; here, Sabina (introduced in the first book, Ladders to Fire) represents fire or passion. She is described as evoking "the sounds and imagery of fire engines as they tore through the streets of New York, alarming the heart with the violent gong of catastrophe." An observer realizes that the "first time he looked at her he felt: everything will burn." At the beginning of the novel's journey Sabina is Stravinsky's The Firebird, needing change and motion, even if motion becomes meaningless. For her "later was always too late; later did not exist." She desires to encompass the same amorous life as men are allowed, without commitment, free of "the capacity for pain." In A Spy in the House of Love Nin explores this concept in depth, having Sabina will herself "to be like man, free to possess and desire in adventure, to enjoy a stranger ... her fantasy of freedom ... to arrive at enjoyment without dependence which might liberate her from all her anxieties connected with love." She is willing to be "the whim, the caprice, the drug, the fever." She dresses conspicuously: "the cape held within its folds something of what she imagined was a quality possessed exclusively by man: some dash, some audacity, some swagger of freedom denied to woman." In a brief but memorable scene, Sabina walks down the street feeling fragile, brittle, "crushable," overwhelmed by danger, but is startled by the strong woman walking next to her, comforted "by her tallness, the assurance of her walk," that this woman walks without terror. Sabina suddenly realizes that this is her reflection in a store window: the startling contrast between how a woman might see herself and how she might be seen. As she moves through various affairs, Sabina realizes that she jeopardizes what she values (or at least, "needs") and that living like a man requires her to live in deceit and to divide herself into parts. I have a weakness for Nin's writing, although this is less like her usual diary style and more similar to typical novels (if one can call anything Nin does "typical"). Bantam Books took the opportunity of the success of her Delta of Venus to give this edition a cover tie-in, but while at times sensual it's not erotica. In fact, the few hints at erotica seem horrible failures: "only one ritual, a joyous ... impaling of woman on man's sensual mast." Ugh. Although I haven't read it, A Spy in the House of Love seems an obvious precursor to what was considered revolutionary much later in the Seventies, Fear of Flying (1973) by Erica Jong. So far, this is my favorite of Anaïs Nin's work. Here, with Sabina, you will discover the wonderful concept of "moon-baths," and that for "living like a spy in the house of many loves, for defeating ... definite boundaries, for passing without passports and permits from one love to another. Every spy's life had ended in ignominious death."  [4★]

Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt by Richard Brautigan (1970)

The eighth book of poetry by the American Sixties counter-culture  writer.

Poetry Review: Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt is an idiosyncratic book of short poems, all written in a gentle, pointed, sarcastic, or wondering tone. Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) is a poet and novelist I've long heard of but never read, and he writes in an astonishing variety of genres. Here there are surreal poems (which reminded me of Sixties poet, Bill Knott): "He's howling in the pines/at the edge of your fingertips." Love poems: "and then to lie silently like deer tracks/in the freshly-fallen snow beside the one/you love. That's all." What would someday come to be known as tumblr poetry: "Do you think of me/as often as I think/of you?" Hippie poems: "There is a motorcycle/in New Mexico." Poems of childhood: "My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me." He can venture back to the Eighth Century to echo Chinese poet Li Po: "Drinking wine this afternoon/I realize the days are getting longer." Brautigan's flaws include a Sixties love of sometimes using word choice simply to shock, and occasionally violating Lawrence Ferlinghetti's dictum (as do virtually all tumblr poets): "don't think quirks of thought are poetry." Although not all these poems are gems, there are still so many successes so quickly read that the joy rarely wavers. Personally, I love short poems -- for me a long poem might as well be prose. The point of a poem is to be brief, targeted, rapier. An epiphany, a revelation, a crystalline moment imprismed. And Brautigan delivers. Although I think he's lost much of his fame since the Sixties, the poems in Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt are more than just a time capsule. Some of them are quite daring, breaking with what would've been acceptable in those days, as did beat poets such as Gregory Corso or Peter Orlovsky: "I feel so bad today/that I want to write a poem./I don't care: any poem, this/poem." Brautigan also embodies that all too rarely found role of the poet as mystic, seer, prophet, channeler of the zeitgeist. But don't let that discourage the reader: he can be plain spoken as a shovel. For those intimidated by poetry, who feel it may be too deep, difficult, or daunting, Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt is the book to change your mind.  [4★]

The Story of Gosta Berling by Selma Lagerlof (1891)

Stories of love and adventure involving rich and not, lovely and not, brave and not, in the Värmland region of Sweden, mostly tied together by our eponymous protagonist.

Book Review: The Story of Gösta Berling is told as a collection of folk tales transmuted into a novel. Some of the tales involve our hero Gösta Berling, but many don't. Gösta Berling reminded me of so many other stories: One Hundred Years of Solitude, "The Lottery," Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row, The Birds, perhaps a touch of the Byronic hero (his horse is named Don Juan), and of course an infinite number of folk tales. In fact, although one can't help but think of the label "magical realism," the real origin of this novel is in the magic and wonder of old folk stories and fairy tales told around a fireplace. Those stories had no end of the extraordinary posing as actual. It's as if Hans Christian Andersen had written a novel. And if he had, he couldn't've done better than Gösta Berling. The story is written in a rich, energetic, voluptuous language, and Berling is something of an Odysseus, a Kokopeli, a mixture of duty, opportunism, and cleverness An unfrocked priest, he is an imperfect man, called the "strongest and weakest of men." He does wrong as well as right. A unique hero, he's described as having "lived though more poems than all our poets have written." So there! He's named the "lord of ten thousand kisses and thirteen thousand love letters." He's "a drunkard, a Cavalier ... ."
Gösta Berling was Selma Lagerlöf's first novel, and what an amazing first novel, a happy mix of Arthurian tales and Christian memory. As our narrator says, "I have nothing new to tell you, only what is old and almost forgotten. I have legends from the nursery ... or from the log-fire in the cottage ... or from the hall, where old men sat in their rocking chairs, and ... talked of old times." That is this book. Given its folk tale origins, there is folkish poetry in its repeated phrases, such as "the highway is my home and the haystack my bed." There's a bear that can only be killed by a silver bullet. There are places one is cursed to never leave: "This was exactly the seventeenth time squire Julius had tried to leave Ekeby ... [he] had already forgotten both this and all his previous attempts." We hear of actual paintings of saints that walk back "dripping with water ... stained with green slime and brown mud" from the depths of the watery grave in the lake in which they'd been thrown. We watch a battle between peasants and the tradesmen. Berling is the center of our story, but there are myriad others' stories as well. We have a mass bear attacks led by an old major, creatures of which "it is dangerous to call it by its right name." Ravening packs of wolves. Someone who may be in league with the Horned One. The witch of Dovre. The author is unafraid to venture into philosophy in her folk tales.
When Lagerlöf touches on existentialism (discovered by one of the Cavaliers before Sartre was born), the young Countess says, then "how ugly and gray the world is; how futile everything is! I should like to lay down and die." She soon discovers that Love is the answer to the bleakness of an existential world. She also takes us into the grim terrors of old folk tales, describing an attack of wolves "until the wife must take her little child ... and throw it to them, to save her own and her husband's life." Our narrator notes: "often a soul that has tried all other sensual pleasures endeavours to find delight in cruelty." Hills overgrown with sedge "which had been sowed there as a reminder that no man's life is like another's, but differ like leaves of grass." Selma Lagerlöf was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. While some might see picking Lagerlöf as a bit of favoritism by the Swedish judges, based on this single example I see nothing to say it wasn't deserved. "The Story of ..." is also known as "The Saga of ...", but my copy, printed in Sweden in 1959 and translated by Pauline Bancroft Flach (and perhaps W.H. Hilton-Brown?) in 1898, titles it as "Story" so that's what I used here. from the land of Ikea, Saab, and Abba comes a story I somehow feel privileged to have read.  [4★]

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)

The first story collection by the future Nobel Prize winner.

Book Review: In Our Time is better than I'm going to make it sound here. It had a revolutionary impact on writing style. Hemingway has several valuable skills as a writing teacher: his writing is short, concise, with few extraneous words. While this can be taken to an extreme, for those used to the Victorians it must've seemed like a blessing. Hemingway works to use the right word, it's a "Wagner apple from beside the road," not simply some generic, undescribed apple as so often pops up in writing. He'll spend a paragraph describing grasshoppers. He also knows what he's writing about. When Hemingway tells how to do something (here usually camping or fishing), you know he's done it dozens of times and one could practically learn the process through his story. He'll spend paragraphs on setting up a tent. Too often readers complain that when they find some flaw, inconsistency, or inaccuracy (such as legal issues in a mystery) in a story, they lose confidence in the author. Not so here. For me, the greatest strength and interest of In Our Time is Hemingway's ability to seem to be writing about one thing, while the real subject of the story lingers beneath the surface like one of his trout, nibbling at the reader's awareness. He's the master of the subliminal story. So, what are my tiny problems? First, several of these are "Nick Adams" stories and he just seems like a rather bland, awkward character to me -- something I doubt Hemingway was. I'm unsure that Nick Adams is the best vehicle for the stories, he's often less interesting than the other characters. Second, Hemingway's style, while a step forward can also become its own parody. Young writers in their teens or 20s are often infatuated by the freshness and clarity of Hemingway's writing, but then turn out endless reams of unintended parody. Hemingway himself falls into this. It can become a bit "See Jane run": "She loved to fish. She loved to fish with Nick." He also falls into writing that sounds British: "It was absolutely topping." Then, as Mailer did later, he uses euphemisms: "That son of a crutting brakeman." As a craftsman, if you can't use the word you want to, use something real, even "son of a dog" would sound better. Euphemisms are, by definition, the wrong word, and the wrong word won't cut it when you're brilliant. Two words that become a habit in Hemingway's writing are "good" and "much." When he says "good" he's making a small value judgment, without providing any explanation. "It was a good camp." "It was a good feeling." Why? What makes it good? Saying the cabin was tight, warm, and bright might be better than saying, "the cabin was good." Also, the word "much," which I suspect he appropriated from the Spanish. Again, when he repeats the word it almost sounds like he's parodying himself. Overall, of course, his writing is amazing, but when you're known as a master craftsman, small flaws grow large and it hasn't all aged well. I can see why readers today may puzzle at the "Genius writer" title. Again, these are minor criticisms of a great writer. As far as the macho thing, I didn't see it. In most of the stories the female character (when there is one) is more mature, independent, and capable than the male character. The men are immature, inarticulate, unsure what they want. There was one vignette that overdid the gore (in both senses of the word, pobre caballo), but that has nothing to do with gender. In Our Time hasn't entirely aged well, and though it has some excellent stories it doesn't have his best work, but as a historical step in writing and as a workshop for learning to write solid, seaworthy stories, it's invaluable.  [3½★]

The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll (1978)

The story of latter day American punk rocker and poet Jim Carroll (1949-2009) at age 12, sniffing, screwing, stealing, and doing everything else that begins with the letter "s" in New York City.

Book Review: The Basketball Diaries is labeled a memoir, but seemed incredible to me from the start, and I wasn't sure why. Carroll is 12 as he's doing all these things, which seems a bit young (first page: "I'm too young to understand about homosexuals"). Teenagers have been known to exaggerate their stories for effect. Sure, some of these things. I knew kids who did some of this stuff (usually when they were a little older), but everything at that age just didn't seem believable for me. It's not a pretty picture. Then finally it dawned on me. Why is he doing this self-destructive, escapist, nihilist stuff? The kids I knew that were doing the worst stuff had intelligible, articulable reasons (reasons on-lookers could identify even if the kids themselves could not). They had bad stuff in their lives. But Carroll doesn't seem to have any such bad stuff in his life. His only problems are those he creates for himself and leaps in with both feet. Without some motive for his behavior, the story rang a little hollow. I mean, The Basketball Diaries makes Charles Bukowski look like a Boy Scout. Carroll lives just a borough (and a couple of decades) away from Hubert Selby's characters, and they have loads of reasons for doing what they do. Even Hunter Thompson didn't have such a résumé. As the story of a basketball prodigy doing his best to ruin his life, looking at the seamy side of New York in the early Sixties, living a life without caring, concern, or empathy, it's an interesting excursion into the wilds. In the second half he begins to mention the words swirling in his head, and quotes a poem he wrote at 15 about an acid experience: "I just want to be pure." Later after a stint in jail he mentions, "I didn't become pure on Riker's Island." It's unclear whether he wants to be pure, or even what "pure" means to him. In the end nothing is examined, there is no reflection. As an adult (when a teenager I might've loved this: crazy stories, man!), The Basketball Diaries just seemed a little pointless.  [3★]

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe & Other Stories by Carson McCullers (1951)

The title novella and six other stories written from 1936 to 1951, by the underrated and under-known Southern Gothic writer.

Book Review: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories is a wonderful introduction to the far too overlooked writer from the American South, Carson McCullers (1917-67). The stories are brilliant, traditional and modern at the same time. Traditional in the sense that she uses intense observation and description to make her stories real and realistic. But modern in that nothing is simple, nothing is explained, and right or wrong have little to do with conclusions. Which means, yes, it's going to be depressing more than cheerful. Throw in that McCullers writes of misfits, freaks, and failures and the reader isn't getting a lot of sunshine in these pages. If the reader can't take that (meaning life) then this isn't your cup of soup. Some might say McCullers is a writers' writer, in that she writes so darn well. I want to call her a reader's writer, however, because if you're a talented and hard-working reader, willing to work to enjoy and understand how a story functions, then you'll find this worthy and rewarding. If you're willing to meet the author halfway, understand the thought and work involved, each of these stories is a gem and a treat. Not for the lazy.

Her vision consists of immense powers of observation intimately tied to immense powers of description. All of the people in these stories are important, and especially important to Carson McCullers. And though she gives no easy answers and nothing is clear, all of the stories are about love. Her many lessons, much more richly embroidered, are: we can't help who we love, love may provide endless comfort and it may hurt, unbearably; we want to love people, to please those we love, and sometimes we can't no matter how we try; love is more than the other rewards of life; let us love our illusions; love can linger beneath and then rise above other emotions, all unwilled; we love in different ways, some we love may hurt others we love, but we still love; when love has hurt us, we can try to learn to love again, which is still better than being without love. Those we love are those we love and that may be without reason. If those are thoughts worth thinking of, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe may be for you. The gang of Southern Gothic writers includes those such as Tennesee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, Faulkner, Capote, and Harper Lee. Carson McCullers can hold her head high in that group. This is a brilliant and wonderful book for those willing to try.  [5★]

The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle (1974)

An aging hippie surfs the debris of society's underbelly.

Book Review: The Fan Man is a book in search of a superlative, because it totally deserves one. Grossest, funniest, weirdest, sickest, silliest ... so many might apply. It's impossible to pigeon hole this book, difficult to even describe. The closest might be A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) interleaved with Don Quixote (1605) and set in New York City, but even that isn't on the nose. Not for everyone and not always politically correct (our hero has an anachronistic and oddly comic antipathy for New York's puertorriqueños), this remnant of the Sixties is an artifact that shows the crumbling decline of that era in a ribald and futilely hopeful light. Our hero, the eponymous Fan Man, carries the unlikely name of Horse Badorties and is a nomadic hoarder (it makes sense in the book), living his "abominable life," who is in search of ... something ... everything: connection, dope, the perfect fan ("it's so cool"), the angelic voices of his own celestial choir. He is cleverly bewildered, incompetently functioning, always failing but always surviving. In his Introduction, T.C. Boyle acknowledges that Mr. Badorties may be "a caricature of the quintessential hippie stoner dropout," but he's also "the holy fool wholly fooled." I think The Fan Man might appeal particularly to those who have an affinity for the Sixties and the hippie ethos, but should connect with anyone who roots for the hapless undergod, the struggling idealist, for the one who tilts at windmills (after all what are windmills but giant fans?). All readers deserve the joy of being swept up in the slightly damaged stream-of-consciousness that is our protagonist:

At home: "What's this under here, man? It's the sink, man. I have found the sink. I'd recognize it anywhere ... wait a second, man ... it is not the sink but my Horse Badorties big stuffed easychair piled with dirty dishes. I must sit down and rest, man, I'm so tired from getting out of bed."

On the subway: "Lunatics everywhere. Happily I am fanning myself and wearing an overcoat so as not to be mistaken for a lunatic. I'm in the subway, man. What, man, am I doing in the subway?"

In the rain: "It is raining, man, at last. I have been carrying this gigantically heavy [hot dog cart] umbrella around for weeks ... and now the time has come, man, TO OPEN IT!"

The Fan Man is like nothing you've ever read (esp Chapter 21), endorsed by Kurt Vonnegut and T.C. Boyle, this is a novel that toils in obscurity, waiting to be read and make the reader laugh.  [5★]

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman (1991)

The continuation of a son's effort to come to terms with the story and effects of his parents' survival of the Holocaust.

Book Review: Maus II has moments that separate it from the first book (e.g., the effect on the author's life of that volume's success), but generally the two are so intertwined that it's good they're now available as a single bind-up. As in the previous book, there are two timelines, the first describing the relationship of a son (after the death of his mother) and his Holocaust survivor father in the United States. The second revealing the father's life from his time as a young man in Poland through the years of World War II. The first volume concluded with the young parents being captured by the Nazis. The second volume picks up there, with the couple entering Auschwitz and extending the tale until the chaos after Liberation. The other story line consists of the son experiencing writer's block after publication of the first book and continuing to learn more about the War years and trying to ascertain his relationship with his father. Maus II focuses a little more on the father-son relationship, which is less necessary, for me at least, than discovering the time in the concentration camp. But all in all the books are really of one piece and there's no point in looking for distinctions between the two. In both installments there's a balance, there are no angels, moral and ethical decisions are made, sometimes wrongly, everyone is questionable in their human fallibility. Both volumes are valuable in presenting history accessibly and immediately, in a way that can't be done by history books, even oral histories. Perhaps some readers will go on to explore the histories and learn about times that cannot be repeated. Some readers may find parallels between moments of today and be warned of the dangers if we continue the way we are. And for anyone, for all the talk today of identity and difference, Maus II should show us that we all share a common humanity: we're all simply a body with a mind, trying to survive.  [5★]

First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan (1975)

The first collection of short stories by the author of Atonement.

Book Review: First Love, Last Rites is a workshop in eight stories. Ian McEwan exploring, testing, experimenting. Trying to see what the work should look like, how will it fit -- is it a play, is it a novel, a story? What's a given throughout that he is a magnificent writer and every story is written with confidence and mastery that few writers have in their first published book. Perhaps because First Love, Last Rites was his first book, he still has a youthful (read: adolescent) obsession with the twisted, perverse, sexual, the macabre. Incest, murder, pedophilia, obscenity -- all on offer. People who are just barely people, without normal emotions or feelings. Either McEwan simply had an unhealthy interest in these subjects, or he was feeling insecure: he knew he could write but had not yet developed the belief that people would be interested in his own subjects, so he went for the grotesque. In one story a character asks a question applicable to every story here: "Was she very wicked or very mad?" Later another character provides the proper description for this collection: "It will be formidable, fantastical, awful, but never nice, nothing we ever do will be nice ... we'll have the time of our lives, aren't you excited?" Like Spielberg, McEwan makes the fantastical seem normal, in his careful everyday, deadpan writing. First Love, Last Rites has eight great stories, not a clunker, but it's also a historical insight into Ian McEwan himself. [4★]

The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick (1989)

A short story and a novella about two Holocaust survivors, a woman and her niece, the first story taking place during the worst of times and the other occurring 30 years later in the United States.

Book Review: The Shawl is an interesting construct. This slender book contains two short works: the eponymous short story describing a horrific event in a camp involving a mother, Rosa, and her niece Stella. The subsequent novella, Rosa, continues the now more-distant relationship between the two in latter day America, when the effects of the past overshadow the present. So much Holocaust literature is based on memoir, eyewitness, reportage, trying to express the horror of the time, to make it real, to bear witness to what happened, to sound the warning of history. The stories in The Shawl take it another step, the intelligent sentences and clever language show Ozick creating art: "someone who is already a floating angel," "a pocket mirror of a face," "an elfin tombstone," "the duct-crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole," "her eyes were horribly alive, like blue tigers," "the sunheat murmured of another life," "the whole of Magda traveled through loftiness." There is no crime in creating art from horror, if it was illegal we'd never have had the immense brilliance of Toni Morrison. The purpose of art is to achieve meaning (even if just that all is absurd), to help show how we're located in our troubled lives. Here I felt a distance. This is horror at a remove, horror seen through glass, seen through beautiful sentences. Ozick isn't trying to accomplish the "make it real" of memoir and reportage, this isn't the work of someone who lived through the experience. This is someone trying to create literary fiction, to bring the multi-faceted lens of art to bear on tragic events. But I couldn't find what Ozick's art adds to what we've already read in Holocaust literature, what new thing it says about those times. I liked how the two stories (as in the graphic novel Maus) show the effects of the horrors on lives today, even unto the next generation. Lovely, creative, cinematic writing, muscular word choice ("her knees were tumors on sticks"), but what is the author saying about it? That it was horrible, that there were lingering effects, an attempt to fix blame ("took the shawl away and made Magda die"), that privation breeds resentment, that teenagers are selfish, that the instinct for self-preservation is stronger than maternal instinct. The Shawl is well written and beautifully done, but I felt insulated from the feelings articulated. At the key moment of "The Shawl" Rosa is analytical, logical, unhindered by emotion. This is not the story we heard when young. I'll leave it to the readers of other Holocaust writing to determine the verisimilitude of concealing a 15-month old child in a concentration camp. Well written, well done, intelligent, but for me The Shawl didn't create an emotional connection to the fiction.  [3½★]

Not To Disturb by Muriel Spark (1971)

The downstairs staff prepare to benefit from the failings of the folks upstairs, which will change everyone's lives.

Book Review: Not to Disturb once again amply demonstrates that Muriel Spark yields to no one in piloting her course. This book is too long for a short story, too short for a novella, but for Spark it's exactly the correct length so that's what she publishes. It's also an archetypal story line for her: a group of people, loosely related, face a shadowy other, expecting something to happen that Ms. Spark will share with the reader only when she's done with the foreplay and is ready to spring the moment. Not to Disturb is really Spark having bit of fun with dark, edgy, avant-garde farce. Here she's being adventurous and experimental in her own way, all tongue-in-cheek. It's meant to be a brief entertainment, a humorous tidbit, an extended melange of absurdity and the bizarre mixed with dark comedy. The plot, such as it is, is class warfare taken to an absurd conclusion, in a parody of expected fictional genres: British manor novels, mystery stories, a Gothic visit to Thornfield, though here cleverly and unexpectedly transported to Geneva. The butler, the commander-in-chief of the downstairs staff, is obviously better read than his superiors upstairs, and capable of taking advantage of that. Characters spout philosophical thoughts, but it's merely the characters talking, it's not Spark herself exploring these concepts. She's taking a break. Not to Disturb is meant to be read as just good fun, Spark's version of Noises Off. Expect laughs, but there's no need for much more.  [3★]

Moderato Cantabile by Marguerite Duras (1958)

A wealthy, married woman explores beneath the surface and limitations of her life while drinking wine.

Book Review: Moderato Cantabile is an impressionist painting, where nothing is clear, everything is blurred, distorted, seen through veils. This is a book that may be better understood emotionally than intellectually, and certainly isn't for the plot-addicted. Yet for those who enjoy literary analysis, Moderato Cantabile will provide an abundance of food for thought, depths to plumb and threads to unravel. It would be an excellent thesis subject. Marguerite Duras' writing is spare, sparse, spartan. Restrained and controlled. The story is intense and focused, working toward a key emotional moment, a visceral epiphany, that centers the story. The book is modern, allusive, but it's not difficult to divine this story of a wealthy woman who wants to venture beyond her current life, but knows the tragic result of risking that journey even before she begins. Class, women's roles, appearance, intoxication, individualism, are just a few of the issues explored during a single week as a young mother accompanies her son and entertains tentative discussions while drinking wine with a working-class man in a tavern. Throughout Moderato Cantabile there is a building tension, suspense, stalking, a fear of violence. In a sort of authorial wizardry, all elements function simultaneously as symbols and as all-too-real complex flesh and blood people. Duras has paradoxically created something both intricate and deceptively simple. Quietly, subtly, thought-provoking.  [5★]

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman (1985)

The graphic story of a family of Polish Jews during the Holocaust, as seen through a son's relationship with his survivor father thirty years later.

Book Review: Maus may be a graphic novel, it may be memoir, probably both. Regardless, it's a powerful and hurtful story amplified by poignant drawing. Just as without music, song lyrics can seem mundane or prosaic, so here the art enhances and strengthens the straightforward dialog. The drawing adds to the words to make a story that it is better than either alone. Synergy. I.B Singer covered some of the same ground in many of his books, and while his sentences are light years past Spiegelman's simple writing, I suggest the emotional effect may be comparable. That said, I truly appreciate Spiegelman's direct, believable words, as stripped-down and honest as he could make it. While the initial focus is on the Holocaust narrative, gradually the reader is also drawn into the narrator's relationship with his father and other characters, enriching and expanding the main arc. Maus is honest and balanced, not portraying the Jews as perfect victims, but showing collaboration and human confusion as well. Although I do not read many graphic novels, when I do I wish they could all be as good as Maus.  [5★]

Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (1849)

Two young women navigate life and romance in Northern England during the changing times of the Napoleonic Wars and the Industrial Revolution.

Book Review: Shirley was Charlotte Bronte's third written, second published, novel, after the success of Jane Eyre. Here Bronte set out to do something different from the story of Jane and Rochester and in that she succeeded. The result is a Victorian novel with themes of social change (shades of Elizabeth Gaskell). Shirley has all of Charlotte Bronte's talent (it's evocatively, beautifully written), but not her genius. Not much sets this apart from some other novels of the time. There is the proto-feminist (verging on androgyny -- at the time "Shirley" was a male name) character of Shirley (of course, it doesn't hurt for ground breakers to be wealthy), willing to challenge the world and confront conventionality. But she is not such a captivating character as to be irresistible. Her more timid, less extroverted friend Caroline was at least equally beguiling. Except for the quality of the moody sentences and occasional moments of brilliance, this didn't have to be written by a Bronte, unlike the family's four works of genius that are indelibly stamped with the Bronte brand. Instead, plot lines and characters come and go for no apparent reason (Shirley herself doesn't appear until page 190), seemingly essential elements are introduced but then forgotten, plot-changing characters magically appear and others vanish when their purpose is completed. Bronte can always write, but the story here wanders in search of a purpose. Not until page 167 does it seem a Charlotte Bronte novel. When romance takes the lion's share of the story, too often it only consists of cloying protestations of the worshipful admiration of angels wooing saints. The grubby human element is lost in white robes, harps, and sanctified romance that I'm sure was rare even then. English reserve only goes so far, or the race would've died out long ago. Her consistent English xenophobia (against the Irish, Belgians, French, &c.) raises its head, but is less disturbing than in other books. Bronte does keep, up a much appreciated drumbeat of girls and women seeking better perception, roles and rights in life. There's also periodic moments when the real Bronte peeks out, there's governess named Agnes Grey, there's clear eyed statements: "We were born in the same year; consequently, he is still a boy, while I am a woman." But then romantic setbacks also have a habit of sending women to their sickbed and near-death experiences. Bronte also experiments with the third person in Shirley, a narrator who pops in for the occasional visit and comment, but I'm unsure whether the third person well-suits such a passionate writer. While still worth reading for Bronte completists, this was my least favorite of her novels.  [3½★]

Dear Fahrenheit 451 by Annie Spence (2017)

A passionate librarian pens a series of love (and not-so-love) letters to the books in her life.

Book Review: Dear Fahrenheit 451 is a fun little collection filled with a few of your favorite books, a bynch (a typo, but I love the Olde English of it) of books you've never heard of, and various bookish excursions, detours, and rambles, all written in a determinedly engaging and energetic style. Flawlessly subtitled Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks, this is the perfect gift for that book lover, librarian, or odd-to-please relative in your life. As with all good librarians, Spence has an endless supply of varied and accurate book recs in her magic bag and you will find somewhere between several to numerous books you'll want to read, from children's to spicy. I get a voyeuristic pleasure from seeing what other people have to say about books I've read, and our tour-guide librarian doesn't disappoint. She's also excellent at noting the bizarre, dead-end, and why-were-they-published books on the shelves. The one draw-back of Dear Fahrenheit 451 is that in trying to be all things to all people (we readers are a diverse bynch), Spence includes a great number of books that didn't jolt my curiosity meter. But that's okay, plenty did. Unless you and the author really vibed together, you found your long lost other self, or decided that this is your reading list for the next five years, you may not need to keep this one, but it's fun while reading through a little bit at a time. Give it to the other book lover in your life. To top it off, Annie Spence's evangelical pro-library enthusiasm in Dear Fahrenheit 451 was refreshing, invigorating, and made me want to learn the secret handshake so I can join in the dark sorcery of the cultish librarian rituals that I'm now sure take place in the basement stacks after closing time.  [3★]

Villette by Charlotte Bronte (1853)

A young Englishwoman goes to the Continent to teach at a girls' school in the city of Villette.

Book Review: Villette was the final novel written by Charlotte Bronte, and one of those works that I could (almost) write about for the same number of pages as the book itself. It's a mature novel: wise, measured, thoughtful, though all about the experiences of a young person. And who knew Villette was a city (a stand-in for Brussels), I thought it was the name of a person. You learn something new every third day.

Bronte disguises our heroine, Lucy Snowe, as an almost invisible narrator for the first three chapters. She is so diffident that it seems she will only be a minor and background character in her own story, always in the shadow of three main actors, all of whom reappear later in the book. In those pages we get a sense of Lucy as not quite fitting in, a fish out of water, even in her own home. But Bronte takes the concept a step further, sending Lucy from England to the Continent (Belgium) where she's an Anglophone among Francophones, a Protestant among Catholics, isolated, a stranger to local customs and culture. We also have a "love pentangle" to complicate her situation. But Lucy, despite her inner strength and passion, cannot put herself forward. She hides her feelings: "it was emotion, and I would rather have been scourged, than betrayed it." Her strength is in enduring, persevering, surviving. A strong woman. A Christian martyr (though a harsh judge). Abnegating. Self-denial and reserve: "daydreams are delusions of the demon." With this disability, Lucy contends with love interests that could not be more different: one almost heroic, the other mercurial, sometimes hateful. Bronte captures perfectly Lucy's psychology, her interior life, fears and hopes, which will be credible and understandable, indeed intoxicating, for many readers. Bronte plumbs the depths of depression: "thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind." But Lucy also tells her story in her own time and in her own way. Letting us know only what she wants us to know, when she wants us to know it. The caption "unreliable" is fair to use here.

Periodically, the antipathy toward Catholicism is jarring to the modern ear (Lucy Snowe has no love for "Romanism"), but seems to accurately reflect the attitudes and times, and wasn't off-putting. The character's (author's) attitudes toward Catholics is certainly more balanced here than in The Professor. Despite the occasional outlandish coincidence, my problems with Villette are largely personal. I'm finding (perhaps as a product of modern times) that lately I don't have sufficient patience for long books, and the plot was slower than an arthritic turtle. Actually, there was more exposition than plot. Most modern writing uses a few telling details to speak for the whole, but in Villette the whole speaks for the whole, as the story moves in a vast number of tiny increments. The effect is a kind of literary pointillism rather than the broad daubs of color we're familiar with today. I believe that if Bronte had cut maybe 200 pages from the book, it would be better remembered and loved today, as with some other Bronte works. Reminiscent for me in a way of Emma, also an excellent story with just too many pages. And as with Emma, the reader's enjoyment of Villette will depend wholly on how much the reader is captivated by and identifies with the protagonist, Lucy Snowe. Although Lucy (uneasily) dominates, there are other characters of interest: the charmingly exasperating Ginevra Fanshawe, the painfully exasperating M. Emanuel, the suspiciously exasperating Mme. Beck. Lucy's life is not easy. The story is broad, a romance, a coming of age story, a story of trial and perseverance, of women's roles, issues of religion, occasional echoes of her other books (many of The Professor), moments of Gothic horror, all wrapped in a single tale ripe for the pens of academics and the enjoyment of the solitary reader.  [4★]

The Professor by Charlotte Bronte (1857)

A young Englishman goes to the Continent to teach at a girls' school in the city of Brussels.

Book Review: The Professor was Charlotte Bronte's first written but last published (posthumously) novel. The book gets a lot of grief today and she was unable to get it published during her lifetime, but I found it as intriguing as any of her other books (haven't read Shirley yet). Does it have some problems? You bet. A long list. But is it engrossing, interesting, and a quick read? You bet. It's straightforward, simple, direct. If you're interested in the author herself, much can be divined, and seeing Charlotte Bronte in the guise and mind of her male narrator (William Crimsworth) was almost trippy at times. I felt as if I was reading over Bronte's shoulder as she wrote it. The Professor presents a picture of a man set to make his fortune, and so is at war with the world. Life is as an essentially negative place where one must keep a wary surveillance of everyone. The world is oppositional, one must defy and deny, everyone is an adversary. William's relationship with his brother, his friends, even his first love are closer to conflicts than comforts. There is much hostility and little warmth. Success for one is only achieved as a loss for another. This makes for a story which feels off, odd, disturbing and disquieting. Where our male protagonist is erratic, resentful, abrupt, angry. He admits he would have no love for his future wife if she had any defects of "eyes, teeth, complexion, shape." Bronte herself said (perhaps facetiously) that her feelings toward the novel were "those of a doting parent towards an idiot child" It's been suggested that Bronte was too close to this novel to make the changes required to get it published. I agree, because I believe that it too closely reflects her own (understandably) troubled view of life and people. "Human affections do not bloom, nor do human passions glow for me." Between her bitter excoriation of the Catholics (although our narrator claims "I am not a bigot in matters of theology" -- but he is!) and her utter contempt for and derision of the Flemish, this is not a book for the politically correct. Her description of the students and faculty was more score-settling with those Bronte had encountered in Brussels than any sort of literary exposition. When everyone you meet is terrible, what's the common denominator? I'm as misanthropic as anyone, but even I was taken aback a bit by her vehemence. Even the "happy" ending consists of struggle and tragedy; the sweet family unit is somewhat scary. Some may appreciate the congruences with Bronte's later and distinguished Villette, or William's fiancee's assertion about women's roles: "Think of my marrying you to be kept by you ... I could not do it!" The Professor is an early effort, not Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece. The romance is predictable and perfunctory, the characters are vague or approach caricature, it seems incomplete, there is plot that functions at times more as wish-fulfillment than verisimilitude. It may have been a book she needed to write to continue to write. But this odd, unsettling book made me feel closer to Charlotte Bronte and kept me reading page after page.  [3★]

Nella Larsen: Two Novels, Three Stories. Full Stop.

Nella Larsen (1891-1964) had a ridiculously and tragically short literary career, and it's worth looking at her life just to see why it was so brief. The biracial Larsen, a nurse and soon to become a librarian, married Elmer Imes (one of the few black physicists in America) in 1919, and they became part of the Harlem bourgeois and the Harlem Renaissance. She wrote two "commercial" stories under a pseudonym, published her first novel Quicksand (dedicated to her husband) in 1928, and followed it with the even more acclaimed Passing the next year. At that point she was one of the brightest stars of the Harlem Renaissance. The two novels were followed by a short story published in 1930, which led to charges of plagiarism. She never published again. Larsen traveled to Europe on a Guggenheim grant, writing a new novel Mirage, returning in 1932. After learning of her husband's affair with a white woman the couple divorced in 1933. She acknowledged that "he broke my heart" and suffered from depression for several years. Mirage, set in New Jersey, concerned a woman who learns her husband is still in love with his first wife, and so she has an affair with a "cad." It was rejected by her publisher, as were her next two novels. At that point Larsen stopped writing. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen (2001, originally published in 1992) includes all that she published. Afterward, she retained her ex-husband's name, receiving alimony until his death in 1941, by which time she'd begun a highly successful nursing career that lasted the rest of her life. She was always exceptional.

The first two stories Larsen published are competent and entertaining, but not earth shattering, not to the level of her novels. She called it her "hack writing," though I think the stories are better than that. Their greatest interest, however, may be for the purpose of re-examining them in light of Larsen's racial background and her unstable marriage. For example, one story concerns a woman who has risen from poverty to security, but fears that all could be lost in a moment. The other is about a man who abandons his mistress because of some "depravity" in her character. "The Wrong Man" and "Freedom," both published in 1926 under a pseudonym (the too-clever "Allen Semi"), are solid, though average (the writing is fine) at best, say nothing about race, are ostensibly about white people, and both depend on an inartful surprise ending. Neither story seems to be from the Nella Larsen we know and love. The third story, "Sanctuary," was published in January 1930. It was soon recognized as plagiarized from "Mrs. Adis" (1922) by Sheila Kaye-Smith, which was set in England. Although the duplication is undeniable (the similarities are described as "striking," "telling," and "embarrassing"), Larsen refashioned "Mrs. Adis" to her own purposes. The story was about working-class American blacks, rather than the bourgeois blacks she wrote about in her novels and other stories. Her version also, atypically, included dialect (as did the original), but more significantly, the key plot twist depends on race loyalty, rather than simple friendship as in Kaye-Smith's story. Despite the poaching, I think Larsen's story is the more powerful. It's a shame that she didn't realize what she'd done or didn't do more to distinguish "Sanctuary," as it's a valuable addition to her work. I believe Larsen simply and deliberately retold the story in a new and more dramatic setting, but for some reason felt she couldn't acknowledge that. Quicksand, her first novel, told the story of a biracial woman seeking her identity, but unable to survive in either the black or white worlds. Our protagonist, Helga Crane, can be bold, daring, but also self destructive (as Larsen described it, the "sorry tale of a girl who got what she wanted"). She needs to, but can't escape from the expectations others place on her, living in a world that harshly enforces the rules of the color line (and sexuality), and denies a place for someone who doesn't fit as either black or white. The ending is despairing and claustrophobic. Apart from its notable social significance, Quicksand is a work of substantial literary merit, more complex then similar novels of the time. Larsen's second novel, the play-like Passing, introduces two women, both sides of the same coin. Irene (our narrator) is a mixed-race woman married to black man and who lives in the black community. Clare is a mixed-race woman married to a virulently racist white man and now "passes" for white. (Some have said that Larsen herself "passed," but she was proud of her race and there is no evidence that she ever did so or even could have.) But Clare wants to re-engage with the community of her childhood, despite the danger of being exposed, and thus we have a story. Again Larsen investigates the color line in America adding the additional complications of marriage and sexuality. Both are excellent novels that still have much to say beyond their historical interest. Of the two, I prefer Passing, but both are strong novels that can only make us sorrow that Nella Larsen was unable to publish in the last 34 years of her life.  🐢

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson (1992)

Eleven stories of the dispossessed, lost, and self-destroying.

Book Review: Jesus' Son is a book I've heard murmurs about for just about forever, and it didn't disappoint. Mainly it didn't disappoint by being nothing like what I might've expected. The unanticipated is its greatest strength. All is told in the first person by a hapless character who connects all the stories. He's not particularly appealing, does more harm than good, and is mostly buffeted by forces beyond his control. A book romanticizing the down and out, those living outside the law, whose affection for drugs is stronger than their desire for anything else, for whom ethics is mostly an unaffordable luxury. The kind of book favored by young men in their late teens and twenties. Denis Johnson's method in Jesus' Son is juxtaposing two seemingly unrelated events, finding some small meaning amidst an absurd situation, or taking a story to a swift conclusion that it never should have found. This is modern writing where words and sense are cut to the bone, the barest skeleton of story, but it's brilliant and it works. Stories begin in midstream, there's a history behind and an uncertain future ahead, details can be random. Yet the writing contains beauty and wisdom: "Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned though." Jesus' Son could be the unholy love child of Hunter Thompson and Charles Bukowski, with its razor eye and the moments of humor, or perhaps an updated (if less starry-eyed) version of Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row.  [4½★]

Ask the Dust by John Fante (1939)

The story of a struggling young writer in 1930s Los Angeles.

Book Review: Ask the Dust is one of those lost classic, cult, "gotta read," novels about being romantically down and out, broke on the streets, alone and lonely, living in a garret (here a rooming house), while struggling to achieve art, or at least success: "I had come there with no purpose save to be a mere writer, to get money, to make a name for myself." And it works. John Fante's writing is a subtle, effective voice. After our hero, Arturo Bandini, hurls a racist slur and concludes "Thank God I was born an American," the next page records the landscape of his America: "dusty," "soot-covered," "dark," "choking," "futile," "dying," "chained." The writing changes. This simple, single-sentence description undercuts every epithet, shows the hollowness of his every boast, until he finally admits "it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done." He is a member of the same class he struck out at. This is powerful writing that tells the story without an obvious word. Ask the Dust is also one of those books often popular with young men in their later teens or twenties, especially those who aspire to be writers (think, perhaps, Bukowski (who wrote the introduction), Kafka, Kerouac, McCarthy, Miller, Mishima. There's more.). Our young protagonist is too proud, sad, foolish, angry, petty, embarrassing, vengeful, uncomfortable, far from perfect or heroic. He has (admittedly) no clue how to interact with women: "I sat and wondered why she could be one thing when I was alone in my room and something else the moment I was alone with her." This awkwardness, combined with Bandini's ambition, drives much of the plot. There are unforgettable scenes when Bandini gives every dollar he has to a prostitute to avoid sleeping with her; when he reluctantly steals milk only to find it's undrinkable buttermilk; a notable description of an earthquake. He talks of poverty and back streets, the shady side of town: "all of the same cloth, perverse, drugged in fascinating ugliness." It's the writing that's the shining accomplishment. The sentences are spare, concise, precise, evocative, everything that a writer could aspire to achieve. Beautifully written, Ask the Dust is a coming of age story that still speaks to us 80 years later.  [4½★]

J.D. Salinger: One Novel, Three Novellas, Ten Stories

J.D. Salinger's legend is built on a small foundation; very few works make up his legacy. There are some odds and ends out there that were published for short periods, and a larger number of stories (29 or so) that are uncollected or unpublished. I hope someday all these will be widely released -- the dead hand should not rule the living world of readers. But today I'm just thinking about what he created that is still easily available and that Salinger, or at least his Estate, has established as his canon. That is, one novel, The Catcher in the Rye, three novellas: Zooey; Seymour An Introduction; and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and then 10 short stories, "Franny" and those pieces included in the collection Nine Stories. So little from an author whose work is so beloved, almost fanatically so, and who lived so long (he died at 91 in 2010). Moreover, we're told he continued writing for most of his life, but nothing new was ever published. Devoted Catcher fans must salivate wondering what is hidden away in the vaults.

Here is Salinger's canon in order of publication date:

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Nine Stories  (1953: stories from 1948 [3], 1949 [2], 1950 [1], 1951 [1], 1952 [1], 1953 [1])
"Franny" (1955)
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1955)
Zooey (1957)
Seymour, an Introduction (1959)

Although I've read it, I've not included the posthumous book Three Early Stories  (2014) in this list and discussion as they were written before Salinger's participation in the war, before he published in The New Yorker, and before the appearance of the Glass family. A fourth novella, Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in June 1965 in The New Yorker, but has never been published in book form. This piece seems like it should be part of the canon, it would be the earliest chronologically in the series, written when Seymour was seven, but the Estate has not seen fit to make it available. I haven't read it.

Salinger believed there was a certain virtue and innocence, a refuge to be found in childhood. His vision was that the natural state becomes corrupted as we grow older and we're beset by trials and complications. We're each a genius when we're young, like the Glass children who were all precocious child prodigies, but then descended into marred and flawed adulthood. Salinger searched for that perfect, child-like moment of goodness and purity, that overwhelmed Holden and Seymour when they saw it. This was an ineffable moment, an epiphany, that for those few seconds freed the observer from adulthood. Holden watching Phoebe sleep, Seymour seeing his sister with a kitten. But that moment is almost too much to bear, like drinking from a fire hose.

The Catcher in the Rye was Salinger's masterpiece and one of the most beloved (and, I suppose, hated) novels ever written. If he'd had a time machine I believe Salinger would've gone back and linked his only novel more clearly with the Glass family, the clan that absorbed him for the rest of his life. Nine Stories and "Franny" (which is genius!) are equally brilliant and as charming as Catcher, demonstrating that Salinger had reached his goal of mastering the short story (or at least The New Yorker story). But at this point, when he writes his three (or four) novellas, Salinger begins to descend into the mad obsession that is the Glass family. Here he can live in a world he controls, can live happily in his family of the mind. Each of the novellas is less charming, less winning, more uncomfortable, more annoying, and distinctly more self-indulgent. Not that there aren't lovely and rewarding moments in each, but for me and anyone who's not a die-hard Salingerite, they are less valuable. In Raise High, Buddy Glass spends most of the tale talking about Seymour (good), and awkwardly, uncomfortably, and somewhat pointlessly dealing with hostile wedding guests (not so good). In Zooey, the title character spars with his mother while he sits in the bath (mostly good), and then annoys his sister Franny who's having a nervous breakdown (mostly not so good). Finally, in Seymour, Buddy Glass introduces us to his brother (good), but also goes on a lark and a detour about a number of issues which seem to have interested Salinger more than having much to do with the Glass family at all. But despite my difficulties with the novellas, as the keys to the Glass family, Salinger's private kingdom, the novellas are necessary as water. For those who succumb to Salinger's cult and drink from the Glass cup, the novellas are holy texts. Salinger has his flaws, he's self-indulgent, he'll go on too long sometimes about any topic that interests him, as about religion in "Franny" and Zooey. But he knows he's going on too long, it's intentional, and he just can't (or doesn't want to) help himself -- it's what he wants to say, just as Zooey goes on forever baiting poor Franny in the living room. He can't help it. It's how the story must be told, and that I can understand and accept.  🐢

In Search of Nella Larsen by George Hutchinson (2006)

The true story of Nella Larsen (1891-1964), the biracial star of the Harlem Renaissance, who had a sadly limited literary career.

Book Review: In Search of Nella Larsen is more than a life story. George Hutchinson subtitled it A Biography of the Color Line, and while accumulating all that can be known about Nella Larsen herself, he also documents the larger and more painful picture of what it meant to be biracial in America in the early part of the 20th Century; how America viewed and views race. An obvious labor of love, Hutchinson was determined to set right the often (deliberately) distorted record of this excellent and important writer. Correcting the massive amount of lies and misinformation about Larsen, this exhaustively thorough book documents a life as interesting as any novel. How many authors, having published two novels (Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929)) and three short stories, could have a compelling and fascinating 600-page biography? In Search of Nella Larsen is over twice as long as all Larsen's published work, and amply demonstrates her essential leadership in the Harlem Renaissance.

Nella Larsen was born to a Danish immigrant mother and a West Indian father, who was at least partially black and died not long after Larsen's birth -- she never knew her father. In a little over a year her mother had a second daughter with another Danish immigrant. Because Nella was mixed race her family had trouble finding a place to live, the largely white family having to live in the seedy "border" areas of Chicago. Her white step-father rejected her, but her mother ensured that Nella received an education and the skills to make a living (which she didn't do for her white daughter). Although raised in a white family, Larsen's mother knew she would only be accepted by the black community. But Nella was unfamiliar with black and Southern culture when she left home (perhaps similar to American President Obama). As such, she was denied a "group" identity. Larsen married a black physicist, who later had an affair with a white woman. Although less than half black, Nella still wasn't white enough for her husband, and as in Chicago and with her step-father, she was once again rejected for her blackness. This seemed to be the proverbial straw and after the divorce she descended into depression and possible alcohol or drug use. She stopped writing and avoided her friends from the Harlem Renaissance, then a few years later emerged as Nella Imes (her husband's name) an extremely successful and talented supervisory nurse, which was her career for the rest of her life.

Hutchinson is careful in his opinions, diligent in his research, reasonable in his speculation, and always persuasive in his exposition. In Search of Nella Larsen is a massive and masterful book, that reads quickly and easily. Larsen comes off as possibly traumatized in childhood, headstrong in running her own life, proud and loyal and alone in the world, but capable and intelligent in the face of any challenge. Although she had to rediscovered, as was Zora Neale Hurston, and was likewise buried in an unmarked grave, her position as an important and early leader in creating black American literature is secure.  [5★]