Thanksgiving is a mellow holiday.No fireworks, no presents, no hype, just a lot of food.A buffet at a friend’s house…a short visit to the relatives…football…turkey and dressing…and then a walk on the trail.
Then there is the menace of Black Friday.
Why, you may ask, do Americans turn into frenzied Bacchantes at the mall on Black Friday? Thanks for what we have on Thursday, then a dance of consumers.
Since I belong to the Fifth Column (ha, ha) of consumerism, I wait to shop on Small Business Saturday. Meanwhile, let me recommend some books you are unlikely to find at the mall. Black Friday is a perfect day to read the dusty books that have sat on your shelves for years.
Many years ago, I read David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, a wildly unconventional philosophical novel published in Lin Carter’s Ballantine Fantasy Series. It has been years since I read it, but found some of it lyrical, some passages overwritten. Loren Eisley in the introduction called this underground classic “an amalgam of strange philosophies clothed in weird exterior forms that have taken shape in a fantastically gifted if somewhat elusive mind.” Maybe it’s time to reread it.
I was more intrigued by David Lindsay’s neglected horror novel, The Haunted Woman, which iswonderfully alluring ifyou’re in the mood for something strange. Think of it as a cross between Sheridan le Fanu and George MacDonald. The jacket copy calls it “the story of a man, a woman and an extraordinary house, interwoven in a web of fantastical and inexplorable destiny.” Staircases appear and disappear. And women are more in touch with the supernatural.
Charlotte Armstrong’s The Unsuspected (1946) was recently reissued in Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics series. If you admire the mysteries of Margaret Millar or Vera Caspary, you will be fascinated but creeped out by Armstrong’ssuspenseful novel about two young people who set out to prove the existence of an unsuspected crime.A charismatic actor, Luther Grandison, has murdered his secretary after she discovered incriminating papers, and made it look like suicide. Rosaleen’s cousins, Jane and Francis, position themselves in the household so they can investigate. The return of Luther’s shipwrecked ward, an heiress, and Francis’s deception of her, throws everyone into danger.
Janet Kauffman’s Collaborators.I thought this beautifully-written, spare novel had disappeared without a trace, but it is available as an e-book. The prose is hypnotic, the events unexpected and moving. The two main characters, a mother and daughter, are Mennonites who do not abide by the rules strictly.When her mother has a stroke, Dovie feels angry and betrayed. This is about coming to terms with love and tragedy.
Is reading common or uncommon in the twenty-first century?It is difficult to know. Now that smart phones dominate people’s lives,I cannot tell whether passengers on the bus are reading or doing some other activity. I never see books anymore, and I rarely see Kindles or Nooks. Although independent bookstore owners claim business is thriving, at least fifteen indies have closed here since the ‘90s—and I surmise that the one remaining is a tax write-off.
Commuters used to read newspapers and books. The best thing about riding the bus, besides the transportation, was feeling like a member of a secret reading society.Women with disheveled wet hair (I was one of many who didn’t blow-dry) read novels, whilemen in suits read immense biographies. Yes, that’s a sexual stereotype, but I swear it was true. When I wasn’t craning my neck to see what others were reading, I got so absorbed in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Light Years that I read beyond my stop.It was not embarrassing:colleagues in the break room laughed about having the same experience.
Reading has always been my favorite activity, whether I was sedentary or in motion. When I was seven or eight, I was so absorbed in Ursula Nordstrom’s The Secret Language, a boarding school novel, that I continued to read it while walking home from school. My mother, in the parlance of the day, expressed surprise that I didn’t “fall down and break my neck.” Later, when I was older,I got to walk to the magical public library:scary Miss Westgate, the stern librarian, was crabby, but her wide-ranging collection of children’s books made the visits worthwhile.
At the library I discovered Maud Hart Lovelace’s charming Betsy-Tacy series, which followed the lives of best friends Betsy and Tacy from age five through Betsy’s wedding. They lived in Deep Valley, Minnesota (actually Mankato, Maud’s hometown). These are some of the best American novels about small-town life in the early 20th century. (Library of America, you should acquire these! I enjoyed them much more than Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books.) And I’ve been to Mankato, a charming college town, surrounded by lakes, farms, and hills. If the weather weren’t so cold, we might live there.
Vera Neville’s Illustration of the Betsy-Tacy bench on the big hill.
We accidentally took a Betsy-Tacy self-guided tour early in the 2000s.My husband and I were riding a bike trail that went through Mankato, so we stopped at the library to pick up the tour pamphlet.At that time, the Betsy-Tacy Society had acquired the housesof Betsy/Maud and Tacy, I think, but they were not open yet: we could only see the outsides.We did climb the Big Hill, though, a landmark in the series, and saton the Betsy-Tacy bench.
Then an eccentric woman came barefoot out of her house and took our picture. She chatted about Betsy-Tacy lore:she wanted to know if we’d noticed that in one of the early books, an old man with a hookah in Little Syria is smoking hashish? (Well, perhaps she’s right:there is a hookah!)
Of course I also love it that Betsy, an aspiring writer and lover of language, takes Latin in high school.In Heaven to Betsy, a novel about her freshman year, one chapter is entitled “A Triumvirate of Lady Bugs.” After school, Betsy and her older friends, two sophomores, sit in Carnie Sibley’s yard stripping the porch of ivy leaves and making wreathes, which they wear askew like drunken Romans. “O di immortales!” they exclaim. Betsy, who has just started Latin, can only conjugate the verb to love: “Amo, amas, amat.”
Some boys tease the three girls.
“Hey! You’ll be a triumvirate!” What, Betsy wondered, was a triumvirate?
“Girls, we’re a triumvirate!”cried Carney, flashing her dimple.“I want to be Caesar.He’s so cute in the pictures.You can be Crassus Bonnie, and Betsy, you can be Pompey.”
“A Triumvirate for Lady Bugs!”jeered Larry.
“There are three of you boys, too,” cried Bonnie, soft giggles bubbling.“You’re a triumvirate your own selves. What’s the name of yours? Make one up, somebody.’’
“They’re a triumvirate of Potato Bugs!” said Betsy.
The Betsy-Tacy novels were reissued in four omnibus editions not long ago (three in 2009, and one in 2011). And I learned that Betsy-Tacy fandom is shared by many writers. The introductions to these books were written by Anna Quindlen, Laura Lippman, and Judy Blume, among others.
Maud Hart Lovelace
All women should reread the Betsy-Tacy series. These novels are entertaining, and they also illuminate women’s struggles and relationships. Betsy wants to be a writer, and earnestly writes stories and poetry at her desk (actually her actor Uncle Keith’s old trunk), but in high school she neglects it for social life.Year after year, she is chosen to compete in the high school writing contest, but because she doesn’t do any research, she tries to cover up with flowery phrases—and it doesn’t work.
Dear Betsy! Relationships and writing, boyfriends and family. Can you do everything? And when she gets married, she struggles with the same issues.
This afternoon I spent two hours reading a book.You know how I know?It’s the influence of the internet. Everybody tracks the numbers online:calories, carbs, steps, and, most important, hours spent reading. They use apps; I’m doing it in my head.
Since I got Wifi, I have read hundreds of thousands of book posts and professional reviews. Some are brilliant, most disappointing. I thought I would like being acquainted with all these readers. But guess what? It often turns into a challenge-by-the-numbers–a bit like paint-by-numbers.
Or is it all in my head?
This time of year, everybody calculates the numbers.The New York Times posts “The 100 Best Books of the Year” and the critics’ “10 Best.” Before New Year’s Eve, all of us bloggers will post our 10 Best of the Year. At Bustle and Book Riot, writers are also worked up about numbers. They lament they may fail to meet their Goodreads Challenge goals, and urge each other to read The Grinch Before Christmas and other picture books to get their numbers up.
I spent a week reading and marveling over Dombey and Son (900 pages), while others read it (or perhaps skim it?) it in a day.
And if they say it on the internet, it must be true.
The odd thing is that in real life I read more than most people. I never thought, Oh no!I only read two hours today! The year I read 170 books, I glumly told my doctor it meant I no longer had a life. He told me to stop tracking the numbers.
The reading life has changed with the advent of Twitter and other social media. (That is hardly original, but true.) Ten years ago, I looked forward daily to long old-fashioned narrative posts from Yahoo groups on Trollope, Dickens, Austen, and other Victorians. Some of the members were common readers; others were intellectuals; all were well-read. The emphasis was on close reading, not facile reading. But people got older and retired, or went back to work. Some of these groups survive at group.io, but the Goodreads and Twitter groups cannot replace those that folded.
But I do wish I were like Thomas Hardy, who read six hours every night, according to one biography. Yeah. I could do that!
It is a rare experience to read two brilliant books in a row: a perfectly-imagined or well-researched book tends to be followed by the reading of a string of mediocre books.Perhaps our brains cannot deal with too much excellence?
But I have been thrilled by Orlando Figes’s The Europeans:Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture, and Guy Gavriel Kay’s haunting new novel, A Brightness Long Ago.
Fans of the great Ivan Turgenev will love OrlandoFiges’s The Europeans, a sparkling, exuberanthistory of the development of European culture in the the 19th century.The book focuses on the relationship between the Russian writer Turgenev and Pauline Viardot, the opera singer he loved for most of his life, and her husband, Louis Viardot, a theater manager and writer. This trio was influential in promoting the work of their peers, international writers, musicians, and artists . (N.B. I adore Turgenev and binge-read his books in 2017 . I blogged about it at Mirabile Dictu, if you’re interested.)
Whether or not the lovesick Turgenev and the controlling Pauline consummated their relationship–some vote for the Platonic theory, Figes gives evidence for a sexual relationship–Turgenev followed Pauline around Europe and rented apartments near the Viardets in Paris, Baden-Baden, and London. (Sometimes he lived with them.) As international commerce was facilitated by the building of railroads, Turgenev and the Viardots promoted the arts throughout Europe, Russia, and England.
The craze for novels in translation became a big business for publishers, especially in France and Russia. (The English were content with their own novels.) Turgenev championed the Russian translation of Flaubert, the French translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and the Russian translation of Zola, to name a few of his more famous projects. Pauline, one of the most powerful stars of the opera world, influenced the taste of composers (she sometimes helped them with their operas) and concert-goers. And Louis Viardot, who for a time had managed his wife’s career, also wrote about radical politics. (The French police found them suspicious and spied on them.)
Turgenev became a beloved writer, especially in Europe, but had his emotional ups and downs, complicated by what often seemed like a one-sided love affair, bouts of gout, and being a considered a dissident in Russia. (He was arrested in Russia after writing Gogol’s obituary.) I loved reading about Turgenev’s artsy social circle, the rise of art museums, the influence of critics on popular taste, and more.
Guy Gavriel Kay is in top form with his new novel, A Brightness Long Ago.This gracefully-written historical fantasy, set in a world that parallels the city-states of Renaissance Italy, is a ripping-good read, brimming with politics, warfare, and intrigues. And in the Acknowledgments, Kay recommends a staggering number of books that helped him with research, and explains that one subplot of the novel is based on the feuds between the Montefeltro and Malatesta families in 15th-century Italy.
A Brightness Long Ago is not quite in the same class as my favorite of Kay’s novels, Under Heaven,, but if you need a good cry, this is the book for you. (I rarely cry over books, but I cried excessively over this one.)
What if you want to be a bookseller but the world takes you elsewhere? That is the plight ofDanio Cerra, a tailor’s son who, after seven years at a prestigious school, found himself working as a court assistant, and, later, as an influential political advisor. As an old man looking back over his life, he aches for his youth. He especially misses Adria Ripoli, an aristocratic feminist whom he met when she assassinated a tyrannt, known as the Beast, for his exploitation of the people and frequent killings. Danio saved her life after the assassination, finding her wounded, and they had a short relationship. Despite their separation due to class and circumstances, he remained in love with her after her tragic death.
Even Danio’s simplest descriptions of sadness moved me.
Adria is an absence.No one living knows what that means, how often I remember her, even now.It is foolish, I concede it. Sometimes we are foolish.But isn’t it also true sometimes that the only way a person survives after they die is in the memories of others?
And Kay eerily writes lyrical passages of stream-of-consciousness from the perspective of the newly-dead hovering over their bodies.
But it not all weeping. Kay also tells the dramatic stories of others connected to Adria: Adria’s uncle Folco, a renowned mercenary commander, and his rival from a neighboring city-state. Their feud is ongoing. Then there is a healer, a woman who can see ghosts. And we read of the fall of a city.
The American-born Canadian writer Carol Shields became popular in the U.S. after her novel The Stone Diaries won the Pulitzer Prize.(It also won the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award.)
And this quiet novel created a mild sensation among suburban readers in the early 1990s, when book clubs were becoming popular.Picture these women, ladylike in slacks and sweaters, balancing cups of teas and paperbacks as they lauded Shields’s poignant portrayal of the ordinary life of Daisy Goodwill Flett.
The other day, I came across Shields’s books while reorganizing my bookshelves. Andso I picked up her first novel, Small Ceremonies, and sat down and reread it. I marveled at her clarity and humor. This beautifully-written domestic novel is of a kind that was popular in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Shields goes beyond domesticity. The narrator, Judith Gill, a critically-acclaimed biographer, is the wife of Martin, a university professor, and the mother of two children, Meredithand Richard.While her husband and children are at school, Judith is working on a biography of Susanna Moodie.(Shields also wrote a biography of Susanna Moodie.)
Judith is a natural snoop:she loves private papers, letters, and journals.She does a lot of reading between the lines to try to pin down Susanna Moodie’s personality.Had Susanna loved her husband, whom she called by his surname? And why did she became so cranky and judgmental in old age? The frustration is that no biographer can ever figure out the puzzle of another person’s life.
Judith extends her snooping to family and friends.During Martin’ssabbatical in England, where they lived in the “cold, filthy flat” of Professor John Spalding, also on sabbatical with his family, Judith reads his seven unpublished novels (all badly-written, but one has an original plot).Back in Winnipeg, Judith plagiarizes the plot for her own novels. And she realizes she does not have any talent for fiction. She must stick to biography, which, if not the truth, is the product of her own research.
There are many writers in this novel, and writerly problems at the center. Indeed, the difficulties of writing well are just as important as the domesticity. Judith’s sister is a poet: both girls come from a home where no one could tell a story.And then there is Judith’s creative writing professor, Furlong Eberhart, a family friend and the author of successful novels of the “loam and love-child” variety.Judith mocks his melodramatic writing, but he is her daughter Meredith’s favorite writer.
So what makes a good writer? And what is good writing?
Let me share one of Judith’s many comic observations about women’s lives. She hears on the radio that a group of women are organizing a “glass blitz.” The idea is to sort the bottles by color, and take them to stations which will send them to a recycling center. (Ah, yes, the days before the recycling was picked up by the garbage men!)
Imagine, I thought, sitting with friends one day, with Gwen, Sue, Pat and so on, and someone suddenly bursting out with, “I know what.Let’s have a glass blitz.”And then rolling into action, setting to work phoning the newspapers, the radio stations.Having circulars printed, arranging trucks.A multiplication of committees, akin to putting on a war.Not that I was unsympathetic to the cause, for who dares spoof ecology these days, but what I can never understand is the impulse that actually gets these women, Gwen, Sue, Pat and so on, moving.
All of us know Gwen, Sue, Pat and so on, and wish we had the energy to join them in such exhausting organizations! A fabulous novel!
Des Moines, the capital of Iowa, is unknown to the outside world.People whoosh past it on I-80 and don’t give it a second look. Actually, Des Moines is a lovely small city, though no one would call it a tourist destination—and some even call it “Dead Moines.” Perhaps you know it as Bill Bryson’s birthplace from his memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.
Bibliophiles prefer Iowa City, a UNESCO City of Literature, but regional literature experts occasionallycheck out the Des Moines Public Library’s special collection of Iowa Writers, which includes books by forgotten Pulitzer Prize winners MacKinlay Kantor, Susan Glaspell, Margaret Wilson, Hamlin Garland, and Edna Ferber.
Here is why I have crossed the Des Moines Library off my list: I am a coward.
OnSeptember 17, a homeless man, David Franklin Smith, entered the atrium of the Des Moines Public Library, poured a flammable liquid on himself, and set himself on fire. The staff put out the flames with a fire extinguisher, and Smith was airlifted to the burn unit at the University of Iowa Hospital in Iowa City, where he died. The police concluded he committed suicide.
The world is so dangerous these days—random shootings, terrorism,global warming, xenophobia, insane politics—and now a mentally ill man setting himself on fire.We’re terrified by the things that happen day after day.
Somehow, it is taken for granted that libraries must double as unaccredited centers for the homeless.Libraries in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia have hired social workers to deal with the homeless and mentally ill patrons.
Bravo! I exclaimed when I read about these initiatives.
But this problem has fallen in the laps of the libraries and should not be their responsibility.It is terrific that they have stepped up—but what choice do they have?Why doesn’t the govenment provide halfway houses, more homeless centers, and even apartments for the homelesss?Surely the streets–and the libraries–aren’t a good solution!
I swept 30 or 40 of my books off the table and stacked them on top of a bookcase.Then I extracted my husband’s dirty sneakers from a sports paraphernalia pile (UNDER THE BUFFET!)and put them in a laundry basket, along with unidentifiable sports garments.
Finally I sat down with a book. THIS IS SO GOOD,I thought as I devoured a short story. But the story seemed to end abruptly (and sappily) halfway through page 127: “…he slips in beside her, and in minutes, he, too, is asleep.” The rest of the page was blank. Wow! Terrible ending!
I flipped the page. It begins with the end of a sentence, “strident—the sounds of a quarrel.” The beginning of that sentence is missing on page 127, along with a paragraph or two. And so I will never know what happened between the nap and the quarrel. It is a printing (or non-printing) error.
I’ve been here before.Once I had to take back a Sara Paretsky book because fifty pages were missing in the middle.Another time I wrote to a publisher because pages were missing from Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog.They sent me a new book.
I won’t bother to write for a replacement of this (mostly) splendid book, because I know I won’t read it again.
The brilliant writer Mary McCarthy is perhaps too intellectual and acerbic for today’s American culture, though I would love to have read her take on it. She is best-known for The Group, her best-selling 1963 novel about a group of women whose lives take different directions after graduating from Vassar in the 1930s. But my own favorite is Birds of America, her scathing satire of American innocence and hypocrisy with the funniest Thanksgiving scene ever.
Her varied oeuvre, a mix of fiction, essays, and memoirs, fascinates me. This week I read McCarthy’s last novel, Cannibals and Missionaries, apolitical novel about terrorism, published in 1979.Forty years later, it is a powerful historical novel about liberals and terrorists, art and property, economics and class, mediation and violence.It was billed as a thriller by the publisher, but it is really a psychological novel.
In Cannibals and Missionaries, terrorists have targeted a small committee of liberals travelingto Iran to investigate the reputed tortures in prisons in the Shah’s regime.The members of the committee are mostly innocents who have no idea their mission could take them into danger:they are Aileen Simmons, the frighteningly loquacious president of an elite women’s college; Senator Jim Carey, who once ran for president but joked so much he was not considered “committed”; Frank, a sentimental minister; Gus, an ancient, fragile, retired Bishop; Victor, a professor (and, we learn later, CIA agent) who brings his cat along for the ride; Sophie Weil, a New Journalist; Cameron, a Scottish professor and Middle Eastern scholar; and Henk Van Vliet de Jonge, a Dutch member of Parliament.By the way, the two politicians, Jim and Henk, are both poets.
McCarthy masterfully develops their characters while analyzing politics and the psychology of liberals and terrorists. TwoArabs and a Dutch couple hijack the plane.When they appear with their guns, only the Senator and Henk understand what must be done to keep the peace.Theirritating Aileen keeps chatting compulsively and wondering where her meal is. (Some Orthodox Jews are served first with a Kosher meal.) And she is so pissed off that she loudly wonders why their group has been targeted rather than the tour group of millionaire art colletctors in first-class, who also headed for Iran.And so the terrorists also take the collectors hostage.
The terrorists take the hostages to a Dutch farmhouse. Nothing much happens at first. McCarthy chronicles the intensity of their boredom: there is nothing to read, and no one can play games all the time.The Senator introduces them to a match game called “Cannibals and Missionaries” which Navy flyers played in World War II.Not surprisingly, when a terrorist plays it he favors the cannibals.
The flippancy of Charles, a witty, flamboyant elderly gay man who was headed for Iran with the art collectors, even befriends the terrorists. His reactions to the terrorists’ demands—Holland must drop out of NATO and cancel relations with Israel and they must release criminals from trisons—are hilariious but also thought-provoking.
“It only needs a weensy change of perspective, doesn’t it? A little bird tells me we’re not the enthusiasts for ‘law and order’ we were a few days ago.It was that interesting third demand that brought it home to me.Why, my dear, if the whole criminal population of Holland were turned loose…I’d have no objection as long as it meant that I’d be able to journey to Naqsh-i -Rustan with my ears and toes and fingers safely about me….Till today, I’ll confess, I’d tended to look on our penal institutions as a necessay evil.And, as for the second demand, can we honestly say that it would be a tragedy if Holland were to leave NATO and suspend relations with Israel?My own answer, I admit, woudl be prejudiced.As a pacifist, I hold no brief to NATO, and though I’m not unsympathetic to Israel, I feel she could use a little lesson.”
The art collectors are told they will be released if they arrange for their families to deliver some of their most valuable works of art to the terrorists.A Vermeer painting becomes a symbol both of first world privilege and civiliation, when Helen announces she would rather die than endanger it.
Over the years I have adored reading and writing diaries. I was thinking about diaries this morning when I came across Mary Stolz’s In a Mirroron my shelves. Published in 1953, this “teen” novel is written in the form of a journal. The narrator, Bessie Muller, a junior in college, hopes to understand her life by writing about it.
Stolz was a popular writer of children’s and Y.A. (then called “teen” novels) from the ’50s to the ’80s. Her novel The Noonday Friends was a Newbury Honor Book. Stolz was far from my favorite writer, but she wrote a staggering number of books, which I added to my stack if I couldn’t find anything else.
In a Mirror looks quite intriguing, and I have no idea if I’ve read it. The narrator begins.
To begin with, if you’re going to keep a journal at all, you must be as honest, and must make yourself as clear as your ability and your reservations will allow.Ideally, you should begin as soon as you learn to write, so as to avoid having to bring things up to date.Ideally, of course is a word like perfection or eternity—you can say, but not achieve them. I shall need, therefore, having started this, to go back and forth, getting a bit of the present, filling in with a bit of the past.Keeping a journal must certainly improve my writing.Perhaps at the same time it will clarify, somewhat, my personal puzzle….Writing, I guess, is my way, though no doubt I’ll wind up with unresolved sections.Who will not?
This morning I also made a list of diary novels I have thoroughly enjoyed, in case this one doesn’t pan out. One is an actual diary.
1. Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle.Written in the form of a diary, this endearing novel explores Cassandra Mortmain’s impoverished life in a castle her father bought on a whim. He is a blocked writer who now does nothing except read mysteries; Topaz, his wife and Cassandra’s stepmother, is a former model who likes walking nude in the woods at night; Rose, Cassandra’s beautiful older sister, is crankily searching for a husband, but there are no young men in the vicitinity; and younger brother James is an excellent student. The plot turns comically romantic when a wealthy American family with two adult sons rents a house nearby. In one scene, Rose is so embarrassed by an ancient fur coat (no one knows what kind of fur) that she hops off a train, runs away, and is mistaken for a bear.
2.D.E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim books, a quartet of interwar novels written in the form of diaries,Mrs. Tim Christie (known as Mrs. Tim of the Regiment in the UK), Mrs. Tim Carries On, Mrs. Tim Gets a Job, and Mrs. Tim Flies Home. Mrs. Tim is a British officer’s wife with a terrific sense of humor. In one of my favorite entries, she discusses fashion: her husband, who doesn’t notice what she wears, obtusely wonders why she needs to own more than one dress. Family life can be difficult, since the Christies must move around, but Mrs. Tim is always amusing. In another comical scene, their rambunctious daughter asks embarrassing questions when the colonel’s meddling wife drops in to tea. (N.B. The Mrs. Tim books are based on Stevenson’s own diaries, which a friend encouraged her to publish.)
3. Shaun Bythell’s The Diary of a Bookseller. This is the actual diary of Bythell, who owns Scotland’s largest second-hand bookstore, The Bookshop, in Wigtown, which has been designated a Book Town. Here you’ll get the inside scoop on bookselling. I enjoyed his short, curmudgeonly entries.
4.Turgenev’s TheDiary of a Superfluous Man. The dying hero , Chulkatirin, calls himself “a superfluous man.” He is courteous, attractive, and well-educated, but contemptuous of society. (Think of Puskin’s Eugene Onegin.) Chulkaturin decides to write a diary to analyze his pointless life. He claims he accomplished nothing and was unloved and superfluous. He was especially unnerved by his misperception that a young woman was in love with him, until he noticed her enthusiasm as she danced with another man. (By the way, scholars adopted Turgenev’s phrase “superfluous man” to describe a popular character type in 19th-century Russian literature.)
5.Doris Lessing’s The Diaries of Jane Somersconsists of two novels, TheDiary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could…., published pseudonymously under the name Jane Somers. In the first novel,Jane Somers, a middle-aged editor of a women’s magazine, befriends Maudie, a “tiny, bent-over” woman” in her eighties who is the stereotype of a witch. Jane finds herself helping her out—somewhat reluctantly, because Maudie is cantankerous and even smells bad. But she learns to respect her, and realizes she is doing things for her she hadn’t done for her mother.In the second novel, Jane is growing older but unexpectedly falls in love with Richard, whom she encounters literally in the street.
Do you ever stay in bed (or on the couch) and read a book cover-to-cover after an exhausting week?This is especially enjoyable if your housemate, husband, or other relative agrees to bring you cups of tea at intervals.(“I’ll make moussaka tonight,” you promise.)
Here is a month’s worth of short weekend binge reads for the Weary and Worthy.
1. Margery Allingham’s The Case of the Late Pig.Allingham is one of the four Queens of Crime of ’30s Golden Age Detective Fiction, along with Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Ngaio Marsh. In The Case of the Late Pig, published in 1937, Private Inspector Albert Campion investigates the murder of Pig Peters, an obnoxious, unscrupulous man who turns up newly dead five months after his own funeral. Pig had many enemies, including Albert, who remembers him as a bully at school. But who was the corpse buried five months ago? Allingham is a good if not brilliant writer, able to spin an unputdownable plot. I am a fan of Albert Campion, a wealthy, superficially silly, shrewd detective, not unlike Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey.
2. Stanley Middleton’s The Golden Evening. There has been a revival of the work of Stanley Middleton, a prolific writer who won the Booker Prize in 1974, as Windmill reissues his out-of-print novels.
In The Golden Evening, the Allsop family is grieving because Ivy Allsop is dying of cancer in the hospital. Her husband, Ernest, and their two children, Bernard and Mary, feel guilty as she lies in pain in the hospital, but life goes on for them.Bernard, a graduate student in history, is engaged to a rich, slightly older widow, Jacqueline, who draws him into helping with the foundation of a cultural society.(Middleton expounds on Bernard’s introduction to modern atonal music.) Jacqueline insists on being introduced to his mother in the hospital; Bernard agonizes over the decision. His younger sister Mary , who begins dating an older boy at school, is not sure if he likes her or if she is being used. At one point Mr. Allsop seems to be cracking up, but somehow they cope.A quiet, beautifully-written novel about sadness, gradual acceptance of death, and the joys of life.
3. Domenico Starnone’s Trick.This Italian novel, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and illustrated by Dario Maglionico, reminds me of Elena Ferrante’s early work (which I prefer to the Neapolitan quartet).The narrator, Daniele Mallarico, a successful artist, spends a couple of frazzled days in Naples babysitting for his four-year-old grandson, Mario, while his daughter and son-in-law go to a conference.We feel Daniele’s boredom and exhaustion, and his desperation to work on illustrations for a Henry James story (his publisher dislikes the ones he has submitted). Mario demands all his attention. And Daniele feels competitive with his grandson after Mario proves capable of copying one of Daniele’s illustrations. Things spin out of control in a manner that is almost Jamesian Gothic when the boy plays a trick.
4. Meghan Daum’s The Problem with Everything:My Journey through the New Culture Wars.I hesitate to write about this short, snappy book about the generational divide, because it is bound to make people angry.According to Daum, the Baby Boomers were idealistic, Gen X is tough and ironic, and the Millennials and Generation Z are rigid, fragile, and humorless. The younger generations have been raised on phones and social media, where short messages without documentation are passed on and believed as “truth” by the “woke.” Technology has limited their imagination and ability to argue. Some of Daum’s hypotheses are wild: at one point, she surmises that knowing the baby’s sex before birth has led parents away from the relatively gender-free roles of her own Gen X childhood to a revival of pink and blue, and a pink princess culture for girls which leaves them feeling like victims in need of rescue. I was appalled ot read that Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock no longer play the college circuit because of students’ dislike of edgy humor, while other comedians admit they simplify their jokes for the new audience. Daum writes brilliantly, and her theories are fascinating, even though I don’t always buy them. But the book is exhausting, like watching a car wreck.
