→ September 23, 2009
→ By

The Risk Pool.

My column on the 18U Team USA trials went up the other day. You can hear my hit from Mike & Mike in the Morning today and from AllNight last night. Both were recorded on the same phone but I sound quite different in each hit. Go figure.

Richard Russo was already one of my favorite novelists after I’d read just two of his books, Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool*, but The Risk Pool cemented my affinity for his writing. I’m not sure if there’s a contemporary American novelist out there who can match Russo for both creating flawed characters and showing a clear affection for them despite their flaws, written in clear, modern prose with plenty of humor.

*Apropos of nothing, I read Nobody’s Fool right before reading William Kennedy’s Legs, then read this book right after reading Kennedy’s Ironweed, with all four novels set in upstate New York. This wasn’t a plan to read novels in geographical order – it just sort of happened.

The Risk Pool is the story of the relationship between Ned Hall and his parents, the shiftless, irresponsible Sam Hall and the wife, Jenny, he abandoned – mostly – when Ned was born and Jenny’s father died. Ned spends his childhood shuffled from Jenny to Sam and back to Jenny again, through Jenny’s mental collapse (caused in no small way by Sam) and Sam’s movement in and out of jail, sobriety, and the town (Mohawk) where Ned grows up.

Although the story is told by Ned and populated by Russo’s regular crew of local wackos, the star of the show is Sam. The elder Hall comes back from World War II a changed man, living entirely in the present, abandoning his responsibilities toward his strait-laced wife and newborn son without actually skipping town or exiting their lives entirely. Russo could easily have made Sam a villain, or just written about him with derision or obvious distaste, but Russo always embraces his flawed characters, and you can see that he enjoyed crafting Sam and putting him into odd situations to see what he’d do.

Ned finds himself torn physically and emotionally between his two parents, feeling more affection toward his father than he does toward his fragile, smothering mother, while trying not to become too much like either parent. His success or failure in this endeavor isn’t revealed until the final few pages of the book, but that question – how will Ned turn out – has a strong narrative pull in a book that doesn’t offer many unresolved questions to drag you forward. The story is driven by the characters, and because the characters are interesting, that’s just about enough.

The two Russo novels I read both had plenty of humorous moments, but The Risk Pool was definitely the funniest, both in situational comedy but also in Russo’s prose. There’s an extended riff when Ned ends up with the prim wife and timid daughter of one of Mohawk’s wealthiest families where Russo’s prose style emulates Wodehouse’s for a half-dozen pages, mostly as Ned mentally mocks the older woman’s bizarre mannerisms:

She discovered the lights at the same instant the strangling Lincoln gave a violent lurch forward, coughed once, and died.
“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Ward, as if she could imagine no way out of this unforeseen circumstance and suspected that they would now have to purchase a new car.

If The Risk Pool has a flaw, it’s Russo’s excessive use of disposable characters. In his later books, Russo uses slightly fewer side characters and integrates them more fully into the main plot, whereas The Risk Pool has more characters that Russo shunts aside when he’s done with them. I also found the relationship between Sam Hall and his on/off girlfriend Eileen – and Eileen’s son, Drew – a little unclear in the end, particularly where Sam and Eileen had stood before Sam married Jenny and went off to war. Whether this was a deliberate omission on Russo’s part or a minor plot hole he didn’t close isn’t clear (and I can’t say more without spoiling one of the book’s few mysteries).

Next up: Edwin O’Connor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Edge of Sadness. Also, for those of you who were interested in a “book club” of sorts, how about Don Robertson’s The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread? (Granted, I might have made that subtitle up.) It’s coming up in my queue, and it’s on the short side so it should be accessible to everyone. If I have a handful of takers, I’ll fix a discussion date about two weeks ahead of us.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 21, 2009
→ By

Monday TV, article, and two links.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 2:40 pm EDT, talking Tigers/Twins, a few playoff-bound teams, and maybe Milton Bradley.

New column on the Team USA 18U trials last week, and a quick comment in Rumor Central on Buster Posey’s outlook for 2010.

I have never been a big cola drinker, and only seldom drink soda of any sort (although I do love Thomas Kemper’s vanilla cream soda), but I hate the idea of a government tax on soft drinks or any other foods that the Food Police deem bad for me. What’s next – bacon? Butterfat? I maintain a healthy weight and have low cholesterol despite consuming both of those items. I can make my own food choices, thanks, Sam.

Oh, and if you haven’t seen Kseniya Simonova, the sand artist who won Ukraine’s Got Talent this year, she’s pretty impressive.

Filed Under: Appearances, Food Tagged With: ,
→ September 18, 2009
→ By

Ironweed.

Klaw links: Yesterday’s chat transcript. Yesterday’s hit on Mike & Mike in the Morning. A quick take on Pittsburgh’s 2010 rotation and on the Angels’ complaints about Wednesday’s umpiring.

William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Ironweed, which also appeared at #92 on the Modern Library 100, is the third novel in his Albany Cycle, which started with Legs and continued with Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game. Ironweed tells the story of Billy Phelan’s father, who appears briefly in the second novel as a pivotal character in Billy’s background but isn’t fleshed out at all until this third novel, which is by turns poignant and farcical, with strong prose and a smart, well-used literary device to make Francis Phelan’s difficulty dealing with his past more real to the reader.

The novel, set in 1936, shows Francis as an itinerant bum with an alcohol problem, surrounded by other bums in various stages of inebriation, several of whom are racing headlong for the grave. Francis himself played for the Washington Senators, but his career was bookended by two tragedies in which he had a hand – the death of a strikebreaker before he started playing, and the accidental death of his two-week-old son after – which drove him to alcohol and to abandon his family and hometown. Now, twenty years after his son’s death, Francis has returned to Albany to try to make peace with his past:

The latter name suddenly acted as a magical key to history for Francis. He sensed for the first time in his life the workings of something other than conscious will within himself: insight into a pattern, an overview of all the violence in his histroy, of how many had died or been maimed by his hand, or had died, like that nameless pair of astonished shades, as an indirect result of his violent ways.

Those shades, two of many Francis sees, are people in whose deaths he played some small part, as well as some people he otherwise wronged. They only appear to Francis, but whether they are ghosts or visions or hallucinations is never explained, nor does Kennedy need to do so. Francis has to deal with them regardless of their state before he can make any attempt to reconnect with the family he left behind. The themes that develop from there are somewhat obvious, such as Francis needing to forgive himself before he can seek forgiveness from anyone else, but the way that Kennedy unfolds them was both novel and gripping in a way that most emotion-driven books are not for me.

Next up: Richard Russo’s The Risk Pool.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 15, 2009
→ By

Nice Guys Finish Last.

Leo Durocher’s Nice Guys Finish Last was re-released today, as one of many good baseball books of the 1970s that had fallen out of print (a category that includes the indispensable Weaver on Strategy, which was out of print before a 2002 reissue). Durocher’s book is rambling, funny, insightful, maybe not all his (did he really say of Judge Landis, “The legend has been spread that the owners hired the Judge off the federal bench. Don’t you believe it. They got him right out of Dickens?”), but absolutely worth the read.

The book doesn’t have much of a narrative structure, working more as a collection of anecdotes presented in a vague chronological order, although more identification of the year(s) under discussion would have helped. The bulk of the book focuses on his time playing with the Cardinals and managing the Dodgers and Giants, with a pretty good balance of straight baseball stories and Durocher’s own antics, mostly involving umpires, like this exchange between him and a frequent sparring partner of his:

And, sure enough, he said it again. “I’ll reach down and bite your head off.”
“If you do,” I said, “you’ll have more brains in your stomach than you’ve got in your head.”
And I’m in the clubhouse.

In addition to being a great baseball book, Nice Guys Finish Last is a bloodletting, as Durocher gets every grudge and bit of dirt off his chest, with many famous names from baseball history ending up the worse for it. Ernie Banks, Milt Pappas, Joe Pepitone, Leland MacPhail (Andy’s grandfather), Happy Chandler, Bowie Kuhn, Branch Rickey, Red Smith, and Cesar Cedeno all show up to play roles in Durocher’s stories and leave with egg on their faces and stains on their reputations. Even Jackie Robinson takes some criticism for showing up to spring training out of shape, while Durocher blames Banks for protecting his own reputation while undermining Durocher’s authority. Of course, I’m not sure how seriously to take some of the accusations, since most are first-person recollections of events that took place five to forty years before the book’s publication, but they made for good reading.

In addition to the unclear writing around certain dates and the question of the accuracy of Mr. Durocher’s memory, his baseball thinking reads today as very old school. He describes hitters by their average, homers, and RBI – although that could just as easily have been the work of his co-author, Ed Linn – and goes on a long rant near the end of the book about, in essence, why he liked scrappy players more than raw-talent players, even though he offers pages of effusive praise of Willie Mays, who was all raw talent but emotionally fragile. Durocher worked for Branch Rickey, one of the most progressive thinkers in baseball’s first century, but many of Rickey’s prized ideas, like working the count, either made no impression on the Lip or didn’t register enough to show up in his memoirs.

Apropos of nothing, one other passage struck a bit of a personal chord with me:

I thought, in fact, of something Laraine had said to me the first time she met Mr. Rickey. Because they were both such religious people I had been confident they would get along marvelously. Instead of the instant rapport I was expecting, there was instant non-rapport. “This man isn’t your friend, Leo,” she told me after he had gone. “I know you think the sun rises and sets on him, but he isn’t what you think he is.”

That’s precisely the sentiment my wife expressed on meeting my (former) boss in Toronto. She always has been a good judge of people.

Next up: William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Ironweed.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 13, 2009
→ By

The City of Dreaming Books.

I had two articles posted on Friday, one on the Brewers’ immediate future another on Mat Gamel, Alcides Escobar, and Colby Rasmus. I have also filed a blog entry on Wade Davis that isn’t up yet.

Walter Moers’ The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear was one of my favorite books of 2008 (books I read last year, that is, not books published last year), and his follow-up, The City of Dreaming Books, looked like it was more of the same, with a setting of particular interest to me, literature.

It is, like Bluebear, wildly imaginative, full of wordplay (including fictional author names like Asdrel Chickens) and incredibly sharp characters and settings. Moers has a gift for making the insane seem normal and for precise descriptions of places that evoke clear images in the reader’s mind, and, as in Bluebear, Moers has his main character, Optimus Yarnspinner, go through a series of vaguely ridiculous character-building adventures, although Yarnspinner does less to help his own cause than Bluebear did.

The problem with City is that the action plot isn’t well connected to the character-development plot. Yarnspinner spends 2/3 of the book in the catacombs under Bookholm and, while there’s plenty of action down there, the emphasis is on his development as a storyteller – both the effects his experiences have on his thinking and his ability to actually craft a story. There’s an obvious revenge plot at work, with Yarnspinner and one other prisoner looking for escape and vengeance on their captors, that portion of the plot is set aside for hundreds of pages. Moers brings it back when Yarnspinner and his comrade make their final escape attempt at the end of the book, and the resolution was quick, obvious, and cursory. I’m not arguing with the general plot, but with the lack of integration between that thread and Yarnspinner’s time in the catacombs. City is still a great read, but more for its cleverness and humor than for the action-oriented portion of the plot, and Bluebear was more imaginative and funnier.

Next up: The reissue of Leo Durocher’s classic memoir, Nice Guys Finish Last, due out on Tuesday.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 11, 2009
→ By

Milwaukee eats, 2009.

I was on Mike and Mike this morning and apparently made Scott Feldman a left-hander. Good times. The moral of this story, since I was thinking about Feldman’s cutter as a weapon against lefties, is not to think when talking on the radio. I did 90-minute chat and believe I got everyone’s handedness right, so there’s that.

Joe Posnanski mentions me in his new column for Sports Illustrated, which means I’ll probably hear from a whole new group of people from my childhood who had no idea I was a sportswriter.

I didn’t do much new in Milwaukee from my last trip, revisiting Cempazuchi (and ordering the same stuff) and Beans & Barley (going for the whole wheat pancakes, which were very good but very wheaty). I finally visited Kopp’s for frozen custard, and it was very good, particularly the texture, which was probably an 80 on the 20-80 scale – you’re not likely to find smoother custard on the planet. Their chocolate isn’t very chocolatey, but the only place I hit last year that had a strong chocolate custard had the worst texture.

I had breakfast at Hotch-a-Do, across the street from Beans & Barley, a really funky, very local place that unfortunately only opens at 9 am. The blueberry and banana pancakes were a little rich and mildly flavored but generally good, although I’d probably give something else on the menu a shot next time around. They do serve Alterra coffee, which I tried the next day at the Alterra stand at the Milwaukee airport. I’ve largely given up drip coffee, but Matthew Leach at mlb.com swears by Alterra, and he didn’t lie – that is some Damn Fine Coffee, dark but not overroasted, with plenty of character of the bean (Nicaraguan, mildly acidic but well-rounded with good body), and brewed at the right strength.

Matthew and I also had dinner at Elsa’s on the Park after I found out that Sobelman’s was closed for dinner on Labor Day (but open in the afternoon … that makes, well, no sense). He raved about his burger, but mine was cooked enough to serve as a coaster despite the fact that I ordered it medium. They also lose points for having no beer on tap and almost nothing local, but I did enjoy a Chicago beer, Goose Island Matilda, a “strong Belgian pale ale” that was a rich amber with great body and a pronounced note of good-quality honey.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 8, 2009
→ By

Under the Net.

I was originally going to call Iris Murdoch’s* Under the Net the poor man’s Lucky Jim, but by the time I finished, I changed my view. It’s more of the homeless man’s Lucky Jim – a similar modern picaresque around a hapless central character who can’t get out of his own way, but maybe 25% as funny as Amis’ novel with an ending that made no sense to me at all. It appears on both the TIME 100 and the Modern Library 100 (at #95).

*If Murdoch’s name rings a bell for you but the book doesn’t, the 2001 film Iris was about her, with Jim Broadbent winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Murdoch’s husband.

I admit, however, that the novel’s foundation in philosophy was probably lost on me, since I’ve never taken a philosophy course or had any interest in the subject. Murdoch herself was a philosopher, writing five nonfiction books on the subject, and philosophy is a running theme through Under the Net, with references to specific philosophers and discussions of the subject both through dialogue and through the plot. I didn’t appreciate any of the references and the dialogue tended toward the boring, while the narration … well, you tell me:

The roadway was glowing with light. One one side the Arc du Carrousel stood like an imagined archway, removed from space by its faultless proportions; and behind it the enormous sweep of the Louvre enclosed the scene, fiercely illuminated and ablaze with detail. On the other side began the unnatural garden, with its metallic green grass under the yellow lamps, and its flowers self-conscious with colour and quiet as dream flowers which can unfold and be still at the same moment. A little distance beyond the railings the garden ran into trees, and beyond the trees an explosion of light announced the Place de la Concorde, above and beyond which was raised upon its hill the floodlit Arc de Triomphe standing against a backdrop of darkness, with an enormous tricolore which reached the whole height of the archway fluttering inside the central arch.

That paragraph includes 143 words of descriptive text … in the middle of a pursuit scene. Just when I thought we were getting somewhere with the plot, Murdoch decides to stop and smell the roses.

Next up: Something a little more fun – Walter Moers’ City of Dreaming Books.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 8, 2009
→ By

Tales of the Jazz Age.

I’m a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, with both Tender is the Night (#2) and The Great Gatsby (#17) appearing high on the Klaw 100, but before last week had only read eight of his short stories, those contained in his first collection, Flappers and Philosophers. Tales of The Jazz Age contains another eleven stories, although the edition I read indicates that Fitzgerald published over 160 short stories during his short writing career, using them largely to pay the bills as his novels didn’t come into such wide esteem as they hold today until after his death.

Of the eleven stories, only four really stood out, although there isn’t a bad read in the bunch because FSF was (and remains, I suppose) such a master of prose. The most famous story, at least today, is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is just as you’ve heard – the story of a man who is born at seventy years old and ages in reverse. It’s a clever gambit, and there are some little flourishes around how your apparent age affects the way people treat you (let’s just say that resonated with me), but the story itself isn’t much of a story – just a linear run through his life from 70 to 0. I did find it amusing to see that FSF received mail from loonies much as I do today, as you can see in the Wikipedia entry on Tales, although the edition I read has the word “piece” spelled as “peice” throughout the crackpot’s missive.

My favorite story in the bunch – and easily the most macabre – was “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” the story of a rather strange and insanely wealthy family camped out in a never-surveyed corner of Montana. The family will go to tremendous lengths to protect the secret of their wealth and their very existence. The story works on its own as a Hitchcockian suspense tale, but the family’s anachronistic ways set them up as a strong symbol of traditional views and practices that refuse or even fight attempts to introduce modernity to their world.

The collection also includes one straight-up romance, “The Camel’s Back,” that is almost inconsequential in plot but extremely well-written and witty, and a subtle meditation on risk and safety in life choices called “Oh Russet Witch!” Nothing in the collection is unreadable, although the phrasing in “The Tarquin of Cheapside,” which Fitzgerald wrote while he was at Princeton, is a little over-the-top, and “The Lees of Happiness” is quite sad without any point beyond, hey, sometimes life sucks.

Next up: Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 5, 2009
→ By

Philadelphia eats.

Before I get to Philly, a few of you have asked about the restaurant where my cousin is the pastry chef. It’s called City Limits Diner, and there are two locations, one on the edge of White Plains near Yonkers, the other in Stamford, Connecticut. My cousin is the pastry chef and her husband is the executive chef. I wouldn’t bring it up if I didn’t genuinely like the food. If you do go, make sure you have dessert, and tell your server that Tracy’s cousin Keith sent you (not that it will get you anything, but it’ll score me some points).

I ate all of my non-ballpark meals in Philly at Reading Terminal Market, an eating paradise on Filbert between 11th and 12th streets, right across from the Market East train station. I could have stayed a week and still had places there I wanted to try.

For breakfast, I hit the Dutch Eating Place – Dutch as in Pennsylvania Dutch, a community responsible for at least ten of the stands around the market. They’re best known for their blueberry pancakes, which were solid average or a bit above, and for their cured meats, which were a mixed bag – the pork sausage was meaty and peppery and the portion was beyond generous, but the turkey bacon was gamey and greasy. I also tried their “apple” french toast, which as far as I can tell, was just some whole or multi-grain sandwich bread, dipped in egg batter, fried, and topped with too much cheap cinnamon, with no evidence whatsoever of apples. The pancakes were worth a trip, though. Cash only, cost $10 including tea and tip both days.

DiNic’s serves hot Italian sandwiches in just a few varieties, but everyone recommended the roast pork, thinly sliced, served on fresh crusty Italian bread, with just a few possible toppings – sharp provolone, roasted peppers (sweet or hot), broccoli rabe, or spinach. I went with the rabe and sweet peppers. The sandwich was about a foot long, so I barely got halfway through it, and the inside of the bread was soaked with the juice of the pork (that’s a good thing). For about $8 it’s a bargain and was the best thing I ate on the trip.

Delilah’s Soul Food had some of the best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten. Even though the chicken was more warm than hot when I got it, the crust was still crispy, not greasy, and was well seasoned with salt and pepper without having too much of either. For $8.50 or so you get chicken, cornbread (the sweet kind, unfortunately), and one side; I chose collard greens and got a big bowl that I got maybe halfway through and then poured the juice at the bottom over the cornbread. It’s one of the few places in RTM with table service.

The Famous Fourth Street Cookie Company had a long line around lunch time on my first trip there; the cookies are constantly coming out of the oven, so you can get something hot at that hour, although I found that at room temperature a few hours later, they were just average cookies. They’re a good four inches or so in diameter and cost about $2 apiece. The “double chocolate chip” is just a chocolate chip cookie with a lot of chips, and the chocolate chip with pecans didn’t skimp on the nuts.

I grabbed a pumpkin muffin from Le Bus Bakery for the flight home; it was a bit greasy, staining the paper bag, but it didn’t have the usual pumpkin muffin flavor of stale pumpkin pie spice mix, and it wasn’t overly sweet. There was a faint spicy note, almost like cardamom, but otherwise the pumpkin was allowed to take its place at the center of the muffin.

Leaving RTM, La Colombe is a small cafe best known for its coffee-roasting operation, as they apparently supply many of the best restaurants in town. I found their espresso to be far too watery with no body, but it did have a defined flavor, with strong notes of cocoa beans and a pleasant acidity. My guess is that the beans were from Africa, although I’m no expert on varietals since I always use blends to make espresso at home.

I learned about Capogiro Gelato a few years ago on the short-lived Food Network show, The Hungry Detective, a good concept dressed up with a few too many gimmicks but with plenty of emphasis on the actual food. They have at least one more location now, at 13th and Walnut, very close to my hotel and the RTM. The gelato is very expensive – a medium, roughly 3/4 cup of gelato, cost $6.15 with tax – but outstanding quality. I got three flavors, figuring that was almost an obligation to my readers: dark chocolate, coconut, and toasted almond. The almond was a waste, as the gelato itself had almost no flavor; it comes with toasted slivered almonds, but the flavor needs to be in the gelato, not on it. The coconut was ultra-smooth with a strong, clean coconut flavor. The dark chocolate stole the show, probably the darkest, richest chocolate ice cream I’ve ever had, with a thick consistency more like cocoa pudding ice cream than a typical chocolate gelato; a medium cup of that might be overkill, but I’m willing to risk it.

I didn’t eat at any concessions at CBP, but it’s worth mentioning that the press box food was, by press box food standards, impressive. The worst part of eating while traveling is how hard it is to eat fruits and vegetables while sticking to quick, inexpensive places, and the CBP press box had cups of fresh fruit, a basic salad mix that wasn’t brown or wilted or dried out, and a few vegetable side dishes each night. I know this isn’t of much use to the majority of you, but I wanted to give credit to the Phillies for doing a nice job.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ September 4, 2009
→ By

Falconer.

John Cheever’s Falconer, another book from the TIME 100*, made little sense to me as anything more than a superficial story of a man in prison until I read a little of Cheever’s biography. If you know two basic things about the author, the novel takes on significantly greater meaning: Cheever was bisexual and struggled to come to terms with this, and he was a lifelong alcoholic, which was probably tied to the first fact. After learning those details of Cheever’s life, I found more meaning Falconer as a story of self-acceptance and recovery.

*This is the 80th book I’ve read on the TIME list, and 90 seems well within reach, but I can already tell you those last five will be a bear, if I even choose to tackle them: Infinite Jest, An American Tragedy, White Noise, Gravity’s Rainbow, and The Recognitions. That’s about 4700 pages across five novels, and three of them have reputations as difficult reads. Ninety-five sounds like a lovely number, don’t you think?

The main character, Farragut, is a husband and father and has more or less had a successful career despite a heroin addiction dating back to his service in World War II, where he became hooked on morphine. For reasons not explained until near the end of the book, Farragut kills his brother, after which he’s sentenced to prison. His marriage, not strong before the murder, falls apart; his dependence on methadone becomes central to his daily life; and, even though he’s “not queer,” he has an affair with a fellow inmate. Although Cheever surrounds Farragut with a cast of wackos in his cell block, the story is entirely about Farragut and his struggle to maintain – or discover – his humanity in jail.

The prison of the book and Farragut’s gradual recovery from addiction and acceptance of his own character seem to be a metaphor for Cheever’s own life, where he struggled to accept his own bisexuality and promiscuity and drowned himself in alcohol, an addiction he apparently kicked around the time he wrote Falconer. Early in his confinement, Farragut is briefly denied his daily methadone dose and ends up suffering withdrawal symptoms, after which he pens three letters, one to the governor, one to his bishop, and one to his wife; armed with the knowledge of Cheever’s troubles, I read those letters as Cheever’s own rebellion against the authority figures in his life and prevented him or pressured him to keep his sexual orientation a secret and to feel shame for it, or just his awakening to the possibilities of a life outside of the oppression of those authority figures. Farragut’s eventual acceptance of himself is neither easy nor predictable, and in some ways it’s incomplete, but that made the book seem more real by giving Farragut antiheroic qualities.

The book is short and moves along quickly between Cheever’s prose and, outside of those three letters, little introspective text. It also moved quickly for me because, once Farragut is settled in prison, Cheever devotes a lot of ink to his main character’s sex life in prison, and I found those sections a lot easier to read if I just didn’t read them at all. The man was clearly obsessed with his own peter; perhaps there’s some Freudian analysis to be made there, but having never read Freud I saw no value in those details.

Next up: I’m still a bit behind, having just finished F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second short story collection, Tales From The Jazz Age, this morning.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,