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★]