→ November 29, 2009
→ By

Alice Adams.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS some time between 2:30 and 3 pm EST on Monday, topics TBD.

Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, making him the award’s first two-time winner as he won two of the first four given. His first award was for The Magnificent Ambersons, a much stronger book chronicling an aristocratic family’s decline at the start of the 20th century. Alice Adams, while fast-moving and loaded with a healthy amount of satiric wit, relies on character actions that rang false for me and never had the same tension or narrative greed of the earlier work.

Alice is a girl of about twenty who has struggled to make a good marriage because of her unwealthy, working-class parents. While not poor, the family can’t indulge in frivolities like new clothes for every dance or fresh corsages from the florist – hey, I said the plot was nothing special – and Alice’s romantic prospects suffer. She finds herself courted by a newcomer to town, Mr. Russell, and ends up spinning yarns for him about herself and her family for fear that the truth will drive him away, even though, of course, she only makes matters worse through her deception. Meanwhile, her shrewish mother hounds Alice’s temporarily invalid father to leave the comfortable but low-status job he has to strike out on his own by modifying or stealing a company secret that he was involved in developing, a move that puts him into inevitable conflict with the maybe-sorta-benevolent company president. Alice’s smartass brother, Walter, is in his rebellious stage, socializing with blacks and outcast whites while making increasingly shrill demands on their father for a fast sum of money.

Tarkington sprinkles the first half of the book with cutting observations that both define the characters and provide a farcical element to the drab setting and the depressing acts of those higher up in the caste system, such as his description of one of the few men in the circle to pay any attention to Alice:

They danced. Mr. Dowling should have found other forms of exercise and pastime. Nature has not designed everyone for dancing, though sometimes those she has denied are the last to discover her niggardliness. But the round young man was at least vigorous enough – too much so, when his knees collided with Alice’s – and he was too sturdy to be thrown off his feet, himself, or to allow his partner to fall when he tripped her. He held her up valiantly, and continued to beat a path through the crowd of other dancers by main force.

Unfortunately, the wit dissipates in the back half of the book, and there’s this sense of impending romantic and financial doom over the book, both through the obvious setup of the novel – I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’d read this story before – and through Alice’s vocalized expectations of an unhappy ending. The resulting structure, where Mr. Russell doesn’t appear until roughly the one-quarter mark and Mr. Adams doesn’t get out of bed till past the midpoint, is awkward and ineffective at building up a good head of steam for the plot. I read it just waiting for the other shoe to finally drop, and when it did it was incredibly predictable and tired.

Next up: The Guardian put Roald Dahl’s The BFG on its list of the hundred greatest novels ever written, which seems a bit daft, but the first half of the book has been good fun.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ November 20, 2009
→ By

The Klaw 101; or, the Klaw 100, version 2.

EDIT: I’ve set up an amazon aStore that will eventually include all of these books in one place, as well as future additions when I update this list.

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I did promise an update to my ranking of the top 100 novels I’ve read, but I kept pushing it off to read one more book that I thought might make the list. I’ve finally reached the point where I think I can publish it without having to rework it with the next book I read, so here you have the Klaw 100, part two: This one goes to 101!

The top 10 remain unchanged. I’ve deleted 12 titles, and inserted new books at 101, 98, 95, 93, 91, 90, 86, 84, 62, 34, 25, 17, and 11. I changed the order of the books already on the list only slightly and the descriptions are the same as they were last time around.

The guidelines, from the original post:

My criteria are wholly subjective. The primary criterion is how much I enjoyed the book, accounting for more than half of the “score” I might give each book if I was inclined to go to that degree. I also considered the book’s literary value, and its significance in the annals of literature, whether by its influence, critical reception, or the modern perspective on the book. There is nothing on here I don’t like.

There are only three items on this list that run beyond 1000 pages, one of which is a series, and another is two books that I combined into a single entry. The third is the longest single book I’ve ever read, although that was originally published as two volumes itself. By and large, the one hundred books listed here are highly readable, accessible even to the casual reader.

I did omit works of primarily popular fiction, even ones I enjoyed, so there is no Harry Potter and no Jasper Fforde. I slipped P.G. Wodehouse in there, since his works have influenced at least two generations of writers and performers, and there are four or five works on there that might straddle the line between popular fiction and literature. You’ll also notice the absence of some works of undeniable literary importance that I either haven’t read or just flat-out didn’t like. I make no apologies for these omissions.

The bottom line: My list, my call.

Kind of like my NL Cy Young ballot!

101. Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh. Full review. His one pre-Catholic novel, a funny, wicked satire of prep school culture without the morality play that underlies some of his later works.

100. The Reivers, by William Faulkner. Criminally overlooked today by most Faulkner readers, The Reivers won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963 and is Faulkner’s most accessible and light-hearted work. It’s a comedy set, as always, in Yoknapatawpha County, focusing on three ne’er-do-wells who steal a car, consort with prostitutes, race a horse, and try to get ahead by any means.

99. Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangarembga. The debut novel by a Zimbabwean playwright, Nervous Conditions might be the best work ever written about the plight of women in even the “developed” parts of Africa, as they have to deal simultaneously with traditional and modern pressures in their lives.

98. Lonesome Dove , by Larry McMurtry. Full review. Just an incredible read, a long, meandering epic of the old West, a meditation on existence and our need to move. A highly American novel. Oh, and it’s an early example of the art form now known as the “bromance.”

97. The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle. The grand-daddy of all mysteries, and the only full-length novel featuring Sherlock Holmes, Hound is as good a mystery as you’ll find, with Holmes at his brilliant and smarmy best.

96. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Full review. Ishiguro’s romantic tragedy within a dystopian alternate reality is imperfect, but the societal aspect is powerful and incredibly disturbing.

95. The Risk Pool, by Richard Russo. Full review. The funniest of the three Russo novels I’ve read, with a completely unforgettable secondary character in the narrator’s itinerant father.

94. Native Son, by Richard Wright. Perhaps the American equivalent to Germinal for its sheer anger and social commentary, Native Son is the story of a black man who is hemmed in by white society and whose culpability for his crimes may not entirely be his own.

93. Embers, by Sandor Marai. Full review. A haunting novel recounting the meeting of two estranged friends, the events that led to their estrangement, and the tension that fills the room when the novel reaches its climax. Slow, pensive, and gripping.

92. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. Full review. Not Murakami’s best, but still strong, with the same immersive, dream-like atmosphere as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It’s a story of a search for identity and meaning, told through two narratives headed for an inevitable intersection.

91. The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, by Don Robertson. Full review. A bit of a sentimental pick – a young boy sets off across Cleveland with his sister in a toy wagon and ends up becoming a hero in the face of a horrible industrial disaster.

90. The Quiet American, by Graham Greene. Full review. A cynical work, surprising for Greene, that offers a severe criticism of the Vietnam War from a worm’s-eye view.

89. Right Ho, Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse. I’m not sure how to choose any single Wodehouse novel, or where to rank them on this list. I’ve read nearly all of the Jeeves novels and am hard-pressed to pick a favorite, so I’ve chosen this one, which also made the Bloomsbury 100. Describing the plot is pointless; the joy is in the telling.

88. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Not really my favorite Twain book – that would be The Prince and the Pauper, a late cut from this list – but Huckleberry Finn is one of the few legitimate contenders for the appellation of The Great American Novel, a comedy, a drama, and a stinging social commentary all rolled up into an adventure story to appeal to the kid in every reader.

87. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John Le Carré. A seminal spy novel, but also a character-driven drama, one in which loyalties are uncertain, and so are fates. Impossible to put down, and not laden with all kinds of technobabble to try to distract the reader from a thin or implausible plot.

86. The City and the Mountains, by José Maria de Eça de Queirós. Full review. A beautiful fable by one of Portugal’s greatest novelists.

85. Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow. An extremely easy read, despite the references to some characters by roles (“Mother’s Younger Brother”) rather than names, with rolling, twisting plot lines and text that takes you into another era.

84. The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy. Full review. A comedy about an American girl in Paris whose cluelessness lands her in one mess after another. Brilliant and, for the moment, back in print.

83. Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier. Full review. A classic gothic mystery, which also led to Alfred Hitchcock’s only non-honorary Oscar.

82. The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy. Overlooked now, probably because of the rather unflattering depiction of a Jewish character, it’s a fast-paced and tense adventure story that deserves to be read by readers who understand its historical context. (And it’s hardly the only book on this list to take its shots at Jews.)

81. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison. Full review. Morrison’s second-best novel, the story of a black family divided through two generations and of one of the sons, Milkman Dead, who is searching for his own identity in the world.

80. A Grain of Wheat, by Ngugi wa’Thiongo. One of the best and most important novels written by an African author, Grain depicts a Kenyan village divided by the white colonial authorities, who use their power to split and oppress the people whose land they rule.

79. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. Full review. Beautifully written tale of good and evil with an uncomfortably high level of violence.

78. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. A novella in the ruined-woman genre, The Awakening takes the story of Anna Karenina, transfers it to New Orleans, and condenses it to focus strictly on the woman, her choices, and the society that boxes her into a corner.

77. Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev. An under-read Russian novel, like Goncharov’s Oblomov, Fathers and Sons captures a generational clash that threatens the traditional way of life in Russia, while introducing the then-chic philosophy of nihilism to the broader public.

76. A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. Full review. Hosseini’s second book wasn’t quite the tear-jerker that his first was, but still had power in its subtlety, with the occasional burst of drama to keep you alert.

75. Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe. A straight narrative without breaks, Moll is a picaresque novel and a twisted morality tale that follows a woman of uncertain scruples through her entire life, from her birth in a prison to her life as a prostitute to her eventual rise to wealth.

74. Watership Down, by Richard Adams. I struggled a little bit with this one; it’s a children’s novel, but it’s not. It’s more of a modern epic, a fable about a warren of rabbits who find their home threatened by human development, with one rabbit emerging as a hero through his own wiles and personal growth. The book is so good that it violates two of my core rules, that a book with a map or with a glossary should be avoided.

73. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. Criminally overlooked for decades, Eyes has become a classic in the growing canon of African-American literature. Its use of dialect cleared the path for Alice Walker and the grandmaster of the genre, Toni Morrison.

72. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. One of the leading dystopian novels with Orwell’s 1984, which is coming up on this list. Huxley’s depiction of a world overrun by technology was both prescient and paranoid, and perhaps rings more true than Orwell’s work given subsequent developments.

71. Monarch of the Glen, by Compton Mackenzie. Full review. Brilliantly funny. Currently out of print in the U.S., although it remains in print in England.

70. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. Chandler is half of the pair of leading lights of the hard-boiled detective genre, and The Big Sleep was his best work, with sleuth Philip Marlowe as the pensive star, with dry wit and filled glass and a very clear moral compass.

69. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren.Full review. The fictionalized story of the rise and fall of Huey “Kingfish” Long, told almost as the backdrop for the story of the narrator, political crony Jack Burden.

68. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark. Full review. A novel of feminism, of religious ideologies (and fascism!), told with an unusual and effective back-and-forth narrative style and a dose of humor.

67. The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West. A scathing indictment of early Hollywood culture and its pernicious effects on those who chase its rainbows.

66. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow. Far more enjoyable than the self-loathing of Herzog, Henderson employs humor and a touch of the absurd to explore the meaning of life and one über-successful yet spiritually unfulfilled man’s search for it in the hinterlands of Africa.

65. The Secret Agent, by Josef Conrad. Conrad is highly esteemed within the literary world for both Nostromo and Lord Jim, but I prefer The Secret Agent for its readability and the presence of some real, bona fide narrative greed. It was adapted, loosely, by Alfred Hitchcock for his 1936 film, Sabotage. (Conrad’s best-known work, Heart of Darkness, is too short for this list.)

64. Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. The first third of an unfinished trilogy, usually sold with the surviving fragments of book two (destroyed by the author about ten days before his suicide), Dead Souls is a dark comedy about serfdom in czarist Russia and the buying and selling of the rights to recently deceased serfs. Its publication and success mark the beginning of the Russian novel and one of the most fertile periods of great literature in any culture.

63. The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. Like so many novels on this list, The Leopard is the only novel written by its author. In fact, it was published posthumously by the author’s widow, and eventually became the first best-seller in Italian literature. It tells the story of the decline of a noble family during the unification of Italy, based loosely on the own author’s family history.

62. The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Full review. A career butler looks back on his thirty years of service and discovers a host of opportunities lost to a singular pursuit of “dignity.” A sad yet witty novel that draws great emotion from words despite a near-total lack of action.

61. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. Long John Silver, Captain Flint, Billy Bones, pieces of eight, fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. Yo ho ho!

60. The Small Bachelor, by P.G. Wodehouse. Not part of any series, this one-off book encapsulates the Wodehouse novel’s form perfectly, with two couples kept apart by circumstances, an incompetent artist, an efficiency expert, a policeman bent on becoming a poet, a female pickpocket, and the usual dose of misunderstandings and chases.

59. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. The book is a must-read; the movie is a must-see. It’s probably considered the best hard-boiled detective novel ever written … but there’s one I rate higher.

58. Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. Full review. Haunting yet beautiful, desolate yet hopeful, Housekeeping shows how much a skilled author can do with just a scarce supply of characters and limited dialogue.

57. 1984, by George Orwell. The ultimate dystopian novel as well as the most scathing attack on totalitarianism in literature, 1984 wins out over Brave New World for me because the polemic is built around a deep study of the main character, Winston Smith. Irrelevant note: The best paper I wrote as a student was a comparison of the way colors and light are described in 1984 and Brave New World. Where Orwell saw “yellow,” Huxley saw “gold,” and so both authors created vastly differing pictures of their dystopian futures.

56. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. The Great American Novel? Not for me, but certainly a great American novel, featuring thinly-veiled versions of Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Kerouac himself, criss-crossing the country, with inventive phrasing and a dialect that defined the Beat Generation and two generations that came after it.

54. The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington. Winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, Tarkington’s best-known novel tells of the rise of the United States – both the growth of its economy and the democratization of its society – by depicting the gradual decline and ossification of an aristocratic family. It also became perhaps Orson Welles’ least favorite of his own films, as the studio forced him to change the ending and cut significant chunks of the finished film; the original footage is lost.

54. Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. Full review. A great comic novel about a mostly-normal professor at a small English college who is surrounded by wackos and manages to get himself into increasing quantities of trouble.

53. At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien. A silly novel that was meta before meta existed, with a novel within a novel that sees its characters revolt against their fictional author. It also spawned the greatest endorsement in the history of the novel, from Dylan Thomas: “This is just the book to give your sister … if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.”

52. I, Claudius and Claudius the God, by Robert Graves. A tour de force of historical fiction, told from the perspective of Claudius, the slightly lame and (as we learn) totally insecure man who survived decades of political intrigues and murders to become first Caligula’s consul and later an exalted Emperor of Rome.

51. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. A protest novel and an affectionate portrait of the title character, whose name has sadly been misused as an intra-racial insult by people who do not appear to have read the book.

50. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. I often vacillate on the question of my favorite Vonnegut novel, so I’ve punted and gone with the experts’ pick. Although I can almost certainly say that this wasn’t my favorite, it is one of his most coherent, and at the same time has enough wackiness and weirdness and Kilgore Trout to be undeniably Vonnegut.

49. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas père. Filled with a chewy nougat center … um, and lots of adventure, with a pair of villains, plenty of treachery, a young man seeking to become the fourth musketeer … and a smooth milk chocolate exterior.

48. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. So simple in style that it reads like a fable meant to be told through the generations, with an unflinching message about the effects of colonialism on Africa’s culture and its people. Its sequel, No Longer at Ease, is also worth your time, even though it runs over similar ground.

47. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey. A comic novel in a serious setting, Cuckoo’s Nest always struck me as the dissection of a power struggle between two people and a statement on how leaders, and perhaps governments, attempt to sway the hearts of men. The pickup basketball game remains a personal favorite scene of mine.

46. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A novel of serious moral questions, of Dostoevsky’s own philosophy blending Christianity with existentialism, of redemption, and most of all of the power of rationalization.

45. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. Full review. The history of Afghanistan, told as the tragic story of two childhood friends separated not by war, but by a child’s severe error of judgment. Whether he finds redemption as an adult is left to the reader, but unlike, say, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Hosseini’s work at least opens the door.

44. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, by J. R. R. Tolkien. One ring to rule them all.

43. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. I’m not sure I buy into Vanity Fair‘s oft-quoted review (“The only convincing love story of our century”), but as a study of obsession, arrested development, and rationalization, it’s powerful and cheerfully unapologetic.

42. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh. One of the strangest books on this list, as it starts out as a story of drunken revelry at an English prep school and ends up as a story of a romance torn asunder by theological disagreements (also explored in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair). Think of it as a fictional memoir that intertwines nostalgia for a bygone era of English culture with a re-examination of the narrator’s spiritual emptiness.

41. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. Major Major, Nately’s whore, Milo’s cotton schemes … and the flying missions that never end in a serious war with some very un-serious behavior. A sharp satire full of madcap laughs.

40. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. The first novel in the Western canon, and the first comic novel, Don Quixote is actually two novels now published as one; Cervantes wrote a sequel in response to the flood of knockoffs and unauthorized sequels that followed the enormous success of the first volume of his work. If you’ve read it, check out Julian Branston’s The Eternal Quest, a funny homage that includes Cervantes and an unnamed “errant knight” as major characters.

39. My Ántonia, by Willa Cather. Never mentioned in discussions of the Great American Novel, but isn’t a tale about immigrant families working to create better lives for themselves and their children an integral part of the American story?

38. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. The consummate Gothic romance, with a little magical realism (although it was written a century before the term existed) and a couple of absurd coincidences, still captivates readers and, of course, gave us Thursday Next and The Eyre Affair.

37. The Trial, by Franz Kafka. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

36. The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal. Sort of a French picaresque novel, but with a heavy dose of the realism that characterizes most great French 19th-century literature. The protagonist, Fabrizio del Dongo, is a slightly dim young nobleman who sets off on a Quixotic quest to fight with Napoleon’s army (even though Fabrizio is Italian) and become a hero.

35. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner. The toughest read on the list, because Faulkner – never an easy read – wrote the first fourth of the book from the perspective of the severely developmentally disabled Benji, whose senses all time as now and drifts in his rambling narrative from the past to the present without warning. The four parts describe the decline of a Southern family – and of an entire stratum of Southern society – from four different perspectives. And by the way, the book’s title comes from Macbeth: “It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing.”

34. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. Full review. Another contender for the Great American Novel, driven by unbelievable prose that brought Cormac McCarthy to my mind. The social criticism aspect of the novel has been dulled by time and history, but the story of a family driven to the edge of ruin still resonates.

33. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo. Full review. A bit rich for such a recent book? I won’t deny it, but despite being set in contemporary America, Empire Falls harkens back to the storytelling of American literature from the first half of the last century, following a cast of ne’er-do-wells around a failing Maine mill town as they wait for something good to happen.

32. A Dance to the Music of Time (series), by Anthony Powell. Full review. Powell’s twelve-part sequence follows Nick Jenkins as he moves from boarding school to college to the army to the publishing world, with him serving as our wry tour guide through the follies and life events of a wide-ranging cast of characters.

31. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. Full review. A dystopian novel about the simple things in life, like free will.

30. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. A great romance and a commentary on first impressions and, of course, how our pride can get in the way. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and the unctuous William Collins rank among Austen’s best comic creations.

29. Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara. Full review. A Fitzgerald-esque novel about one man’s self-destruction through alcohol as he rebels against the confines of the small town where he and his status-conscious wife live.

28. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury is better known for his science fiction – the dystopian masterpiece Fahrenheit 451 just missed the cut for this list – but this old-fashioned gothic horror story uses fear to drive the narrative forward as a sinister circus comes to a small Southern town and two kids find that their curiosity may do more than kill a cat.

27. Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene. Although it doesn’t have the gravitas of Greene’s serious novels (like The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair), Our Man in Havana is the most serious of his “entertainments” that I’ve read. It’s a rich satire about a vacuum cleaner salesman who is recruited as a British spy and fulfills his duties by sending in blueprints of vacuums and passing them off as new Cuban weapons systems.

26. The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens. Full review. Dickens’ first novel and perhaps the first true best-seller in English literature, Pickwick is a classic picaresque novel that showcases the sense of humor Dickens apparently lost somewhere on the way to two of the banes of my high school years, Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities.

25. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Full review. My view on this book has changed dramatically since I read it. I was shocked by the bleak setting and gruesome details of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world, but the raw power of the Man’s love for the Boy and willingness to do anything, brave anything, believe anything to give his son a chance, however slim, at a future … well, if you have a child, you will understand. But I still don’t want to see the cellar scene on film, because I won’t be able to un-see it.

24. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton. Full review. Another Pulitzer Prize winner, two years after The Magnificent Ambersons won, Age combines a love triangle, biting but hilarious commentary, and the stifling social norms of the Gilded Age for one of the greatest American novels ever written.

23. Persuasion, by Jane Austen. Anne Elliott was persuaded by her father and Lady Russell to decline an “unfavorable” match with a poor sailor when she was nineteen. Now twenty-seven and apparently headed for spinsterhood, she learns that her suitor has returned to England a wealthy captain. Austen’s last novel is the tightest and brings the most tension without skimping on the wit provided by, among others, Anne’s complete fathead of a father.

22. Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett. Dark and violent and completely gripping, Red Harvest was Hammett’s first novel and established the format of the hard-boiled detective novel with its sparse style and unblinking descriptions of bloodshed. It may have been the basis for Kurosawa’s Yojimbo as well.

21. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. Perhaps the archetype of the brooding male hero, although I kind of felt Heathcliff was just an asshole. It’s a tremendous story of anger, vengeance, and cruelty, unfolding in layers as one might peel back an onion. Also available in a much-beloved semaphore version.

20. If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino. If you love inventive or just plain weird books, this is for you. The subject of the novel is the reading of a novel. Alternating chapters show a dialogue between the Author and the Reader, interlaced with opening chapters from various fictional novels. Calvino, one of the great fabulists of the twentieth century, takes his inspired silliness to a new level.

19. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s all about the green light. Jay Gatsby’s ill-fated chase of the American Dream, set in the Jazz Age as the automobile begins to make its presence felt on our culture. It ranked first on the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century, and second on the Modern Library’s own list.

18. The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford. A classic English novel of betrayal, The Good Soldier describes a web of infidelities that destroys the lives of five people, with incredible dialogue and the powerful, recurring symbol of the human heart. I’m pretty sure that at $2.50 it’s the cheapest book on this list.

17. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel, by Susanna Clarke. Full review.The fastest thousand pages you’ll ever read – a slow-building story that burns the fantasy genre down and builds it back up into a story of power, corruption, greed, jealousy, and mania.

16. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter , by Carson McCullers. Full review. An amazing achievement of prose and of literary introspection. McCullers looks into the human soul and finds a lot of dusk, if not dark night.

15. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. Like stepping into a lucid dream, and indeed, the protagonist finds the line between reality and dreams blurring while searching for his wife, who has either left him or is being held against her will. You’ll have a hard time putting it down, although there is one scene of graphic torture that was tough to get through.

14. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. Ignatius J. Reilly with his dyspeptic valve is one of the great hero-antiheroes in American literature as he’s forced to get his lazy ass a job. The book was published posthumously after Toole’s suicide through the persistence of his mother, who is portrayed in an unflattering light in the book, and novelist Walker Percy; twelve years after Toole’s death, Confederacy won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

13. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy. Hated it in high school … okay, that’s not fair, I hated the first twenty pages and rented the movie. I went back for a re-read 16 years later and saw what I’d missed: One of the greatest ironic novels I’ve ever read. It’s bleak in its portraits of English society and its strictures, of human emotions, and of fate, but Hardy (who also was a noted poet) writes beautifully and slips numerous bits of wordplay into the text.

12. The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins. Collins, a protégé of Charles Dickens, believed that nothing in the novel was more important than the plot, and he wrote perhaps the first suspense novel in this story of mistaken identities, ghost sightings, and the unctuous, nefarious villain Count Fosco. Its use of multiple narrators was revolutionary for the time, and while it has the potential to be confusing, it’s critical for the way Collins wants to unfold the plot before the reader.

11. Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons. Full review. A short satire with layers and layers of humor, from wordplay to stereotypes turned inside out. The story is thin but readable, although the story is hardly the point. It’s just a joyous, hilarious read.

10. Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh. Full review. A hilarious and absurd satire of the news media that was written in the 1930s but is just as relevant today, as a man who wants no part of the job becomes a foreign correspondent to an African state on the brink of civil war.

9. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding. Fielding made his bones as a novelist by parodying Samuel Richardson’s Pamela with his own work, Shamela, and then moved to a broader satire with Joseph Andrews before stepping out with an entirely original work, the comic picaresque Tom Jones. The story is built around Jones’ romantic pursuit of the daughter of Squire Western, who is constantly trying to pair his daughter up with the villainous son of Jones’ foster parents. Along the way Jones is arrested, accosted, consorts with prostitutes, and runs into no end of conniving, selfish secondary characters.

8. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. The history of Colombia told as the history of one family, with a heavy dose of magical realism and the sweeping feel of an epic despite the focus on individual characters. The Buendía family plays a role in the rise of the fictional town of Macondo until a banana plantation, owned by foreigners, arrives and triggers a lengthy and ultimately complete collapse.

7. Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner. The history of the American South told as the history of one family, mostly limited to the decline of the region after the Civil War. Patriarch Thomas Sutpen builds his fortune, but sets the seeds for his family’s downfall through his greed and racism. Told in Faulkner’s usual style of multiple perspectives and winding prose.

6. Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton. The best book ever written about Africa was written by a white South African, decrying the country’s apartheid system while offering threads of hope for its future once the system is dismantled. Preacher Stephen Kumalo leaves his rural village to go to the city to help his dissolute sister, Gertrude, and find his son, named Absalom, who went to help Gertrude earlier but never returned and ends up in jail.

5. Beloved, by Toni Morrison. And here we have African-American history, dating back to their emancipation from slavery. Sethe and her daughter Denver are trying to establish a live for themselves as free women when a young woman, known simply as “Beloved,” arrives at the house. Is she the reincarnation of the child Sethe killed to keep her out of slavery? Sethe’s obsession with Beloved opens the door to a host of questions – are African-Americans held down by the weight of their past, or are they complicit in allowing their past to weigh them down? No one writing today does so with prose like Morrison’s or with as much literary depth.

4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The greatest one-hit wonder in literature and perhaps in the arts. The story alone makes it a classic, but Lee’s use of language, combining a Southern dialect with the unmistakable voice of a child, elevates it to its legendary status.

3. Emma, by Jane Austen. Austen herself wrote that she didn’t expect anyone to like her meddling, imperious protagonist, but nearly two hundred years after publication the book remains extremely popular, and the title character is a major reason. Character development was never Austen’s strength, but Emma grows up across the book’s 400-odd pages, with the usual cast of comic-relief supporting characters, including her worrywart father and the garrulous Miss Bates.

2. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. To the reviewer who called Lolita “the only convincing love story of our century,” I submit Tender is the Night, the story of the gradual, inexorable breakdown of the seemingly perfect marriage between two beautiful people by way of infidelity, drink, and mental illness. If Fitzgerald had to go out early, he could not have gone out on a higher note.

1. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. An absolute masterpiece, banned by the Soviets for decades for its subtle yet severe indictment of communism’s many, many failures. The Devil comes to Moscow and exposes its society for all its vapidity, running into the frustrated author The Master and his faithful girlfriend Margarita, a story intertwined with a dialogue between Pontius Pilate and Jesus, all stacked with allusions to the Bible and major works of 19th century Russian literature. It is a work of unbridled genius, of acrimonious dissent, and most of all, of hope and faith in humanity.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ November 17, 2009
→ By

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Some of my TV hit from yesterday is available online. I’ve got a quick take on the Adrian Gonzalez/White Sox rumor on Rumor Central. My morning wrapup piece is now up as well.

—

Question: If Stieg Larsson had lived to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo get published, would it have received the same fawning critical reaction? After reading the book, I have to doubt it. It’s a brisk read, sometimes gripping, but it’s a lot closer to your average mass-market pot-boiler than the serious novel of ideas that the pull quotes I’ve seen would indicate.

Mikael Blomkvist is a crusading journalist in Stockholm who, at the book’s opening, has been found guilty of libel and sentenced to three months in jail after a big expose he ran on a leading Swedish businessman turned out to be based on fabricated information. Blomkvist is then summoned to meet the patriarch of the Vanger family, Henrick, who wants to employ him to write the family history and use that as a ruse to dig around the forty-year-old disappearance of his niece, Harriet Vanger, who is presumed dead but whose body was never found. Henrik used a private security company to run a background check on Blomkvist, and the report was written by Lisbeth Salander, the inked girl of the book’s title, a brilliant loner with issues and a serious (but seemingly justified) hatred of men. Salander and Blomkvist end up working together on the Harriet case for Henrik, for their own curiosity, and for the potential to save Blomkvist’s publication, Millennium, which ran the discredited article.

The story flies by, even though Larsson hasn’t overpacked the book with action sequences. There’s just one major protagonist-in-jeopardy episode, and much of the remainder of the investigation part of the book covers Blomkvist and Salander’s efforts to unearth information on the Vanger clan, since they’re working a very cold case in which modern investigative techniques aren’t that useful. Following Blomkvist as he navigates some of the odd personalities associated with the case is interested for fifty pages or so, but it’s not enough to sustain the narrative, and Larsson eventually has to push the plot forward with some “aha” moments and discoveries. I finished the book inside of 96 hours, and that one bit where Blomkvist is nearly killed is a heart-pounder.

The main problem with Girl is that it’s not so much a detective story or thriller as it is a revenge fantasy. Larsson piles injustices on both his two main protagonists and on unseen victims, then takes out the crooks and the creeps one by one in clinical fashion. I admit to seeing a certain satisfaction in watching Blomkvist and Salander – particularly Salander, who is almost sociopathic in her vengeance, although I imagine Larsson intended to make it seem more obsessive/therapeutic – bring justice to bear on the baddies, but it also made for a cliche-ridden plot with only one really surprising twist (one that was actually foreshadowed at the book’s opening, although Larsson did a nice job casting doubt on that initial suspicion).

Those two protagonists are also somewhat thinly drawn. Blomkvist is atonal – he’s not perfect, as he’s consistently reckless in his personal liaisons and many of his professional choices, including the one that nearly gets him killed – but he’s roughly as interesting as a glass of water. Salander is far more interesting as the brilliant freak with the mysterious past, driven by some unknown but unpleasant episode from her childhood, but her absurd memory and skill with computers remove doubt from the reader’s mind – she breaks every code, obtains every file or photo, remembers every detail. Flawed detectives have to work to solve a case. Salander just has to breathe.

The prose is just atrocious, although I’m not sure how much is Larsson’s (he was a journalist by trade, not a fiction writer, and I think it showed in his wording) and how much is just a bad translation from the original Swedish:

Finally he opened his shoulder bag and put his iBook on the desk in the office. Then he stopped and looked about him with a sheepish expression. The benefits of living in the countryside, forsooth. There was nowhere to plug in the broadband cable. He did not even have a telephone jack to connect an old dial-up modem.

Larsson loaded the text with irrelevant details that don’t set the scene or elucidate anything about the plot or characters; that sort of self-editing is critical to any novel but particularly one in the detective genre. He also degenerates into dimwitted populism that reminded me of why I stopped reading Michael Crichton after two books:

“The Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn’t have a thing to do with reality or with the Swedish economy.”

I mean, aside from the inherent ignorance of what the purpose of a stock exchange is, and the omission of the fact that personal wealth in any capitalist economy is going to be at least partly driven by the movement in the equity markets, Larsson (speaking through Blomkvist) really nails it.

Would I recommend the book? It’s a fast and entertaining read, and if that’s what you want from your novels, then you’ll enjoy it. I’ll probably check out the sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, when it comes out in paperback, although I can’t say I’m dying to do so. (Larsson does end with a small personal cliffhanger for Salander, which struck me as a little unrealistic and not a driver towards the next book.) Having read so many better novels even within the space of detective stories, though, I found The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to be like empty calories.

Incidentally, friend of the dish Levi Stahl disliked the book far more than I did. I at least enjoyed the reading, but the prose seems to have made Levi quite angry.

Next up: Wayne Curtis’ And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, a non-fiction book about my favorite distilled spirit. A bit of trivia from the book: If rum is the distilled essence of molasses, and brandy is the distilled essence of wine, what spirit is the distilled essence of beer?

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ November 16, 2009
→ By

The Remains of the Day.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS on Monday afternoon right after the Rookies of the Year are announced at 2 pm EST, and then again at 2:40 pm to talk more about those winners and the awards to come over the next week-plus.

I’ve got a short take on Dan Uggla on Rumor Central.

I’m doing a daily wrap-up/links column each weekday this week in Buster Olney’s absence, so if you see any news story, rumor, or blog item that you think is worthy of a comment, please throw a link in a comment on this or any post this week, or shoot me an email.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is a stunning novel, powerful and moving despite being understated at almost every turn – a quintessential English novel written by a man who was actually born in Japan but who has become one of the greatest English novelists of the last half-century. Very few books can contain so little action and yet carry such emotional weight, even with an inevitable finish that brings the curtain down on the protagonist/narrator in crushing fashion.

Mr. Stevens has been a butler for 30 years at Darlington Hall, most of that time serving Lord Darlington, a well-meaning nobleman who indulges his liberal worldview by dabbling in international politics between the world wars. Darlington is dead for three years at the novel’s start, but Stevens takes the reader through a series of flashbacks that gradually expose the nature and effects of his master’s efforts as well as his relationship with Miss Kenton, who oversees the female staff in the house and occasionally shocks Stevens with the strength of her will and with actions and words he can’t quite interpret. As the flashbacks deepen, helped along by some chance events on a six-day sojourn Stevens takes to visit the now-married Miss Kenton in her village, Stevens becomes more aware of what the last thirty years have truly entailed for him.

Although regret is, to my reading, the overwhelming theme of the novel, work/life balance also seems to play heavily in Ishiguro’s rendering of Stevens’ life and character. Through extraordinarily dedicated service and loyalty both to his master and to an independent ideal of “dignity” in work, Stevens has spent all of his energy on his vocation, letting it subdue or crowd out any person underneath his work-oriented exterior. This leads to the questions of regret which hang over the novel and come to the fore in the final section, but on its own, Stevens’ almost obsessive pursuit of dignity and the butlering ideal leave him out of touch with the people and actions taking place around him – sometimes deliberately, but other times inadvertently, and much to his loss in the long run.

The Remains of the Day isn’t all heaviness and sorrow, however; an English novel of manners should at least have a dose of comedy, and this one does, particularly Stevens’ inability to gel with his new American master, who expects a bit of a repartee with his head man but finds Stevens unequal to the task. Stevens recognizes that his boss wants a bit of “bantering” and applies himself to the task as if he were trying to learn to cook or to speak French, with comic effect.

I’ve previously reviewed (and loved) Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Next up: I’ve got about 120 pages to go in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (now 50% off at amazon), a pretty fast-moving detective novel that has become an international best-seller.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ November 12, 2009
→ By

Cold Comfort Farm.

Klawchat today at 1 pm EST.

Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm is the funniest book I’ve read this year and one of the funniest I’ve ever read. It combines the dry wit of vintage Wodehouse with the social commentary of Waugh and the literary satire of Henry Fielding. It is hard to believe it was Gibbons’ first novel, written when she was just 23, when it is so note-perfect.

Cold Comfort Farm tells the story of recently orphaned Flora Poste, whose parents were scarcely part of her life anyway, and who ends up staying with some distant relations in the south of England on the farm of the book’s title. Said farm is populated by a cast of ridiculous (and ridiculously named) characters, led by the mysterious Aunt Ada Doom, who stays in her room all but two days of each year and refers ad nauseum to the time when she was a little girl and “saw something nasty in the woodshed!” Aunt Ada keeps all her relations tied to the farm, threatening to go mad if any should leave, so everyone on the farm is horribly repressed in some way – most romantically or sexually, but some in other ways.

Gibbons was parodying the romantic rural novels of the time period, most of which have been forgotten even as her novel has remained popular, with Flora herself referring to them and joking about fearing finding two cousins with names like Seth and Reuben when she gets to the farm, which, of course, turns out to be the case. Gibbons even took aim at one of the leading lights of the literary establishment: the simpering, sex-obsessed Mr. Mybug stands in for D.H. Lawrence, seeing phallic symbols everywhere he looks and, of course, falling hopelessly for Flora without any provocation on her part.

The introduction to the current edition of Cold Comfort Farm features an introduction by Lynne Truss that does an excellent job of breaking down the novel’s power to amaze even readers who aren’t familiar with the saccharine novels Gibbons was satirizing:

Flora finds at Cold Comfort Farm a group of people who have been reduced to novelistic clichés – rather like the curvy cartoon-figure Jessica Rabbit in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, who famously drawled her existential plight, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”Flora helps each character out of his or her difficulties and they quickly find happiness. She is a character in a novel who reads the other characters as characters and rewrites them as people. It’s the ultimate narrative miracle

Think of it as a precursor to Jasper Fforde*, where, instead of the protagonist ‘jumping’ into a novel, she simply lives it, and takes the stock characters she meets and gives them each a third dimension (or, in the case of Seth, simply discovers it and opens it up to the world), working as an extension of the novelist within the book.

*Gibbons even dabbles a little in Ffordian futurism (if you’ll excuse the chronological error) in the book, continuing the parallel with Fforde, setting the book about 15-20 years after the year in which it was published, mentioning video-phones and air mail and and an Anglo-Nicaraguan war in 1946.

As Flora fixes or fills out each character, Gibbons exposes the stereotypes or just flimsy drawings through humor. The ancient Adam Lambsbreath is supposed to be simple and rustic, cleaning (“clettering”) dishes with a twig, and yet Flora wins him over by treating him as more than a prop. Even the farm’s bull, Big Business, is just looking for a bit of a release, and gets it in a passage where Gibbons seems to be having fun with us by channeling her own inner Mybug/Lawrence. And when someone finally replies to Aunt Ada’s cries of “I saw something nasty in the woodshed!” … well, I won’t spoil the book’s funniest line, a brilliant four-word riposte that turns the old bat’s story on its head.

Next up: Almost done with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, a book good enough that I’m holding off on the revised Klaw 100 until I finish it.

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

The Case of the Missing Books.

I’m back and online again. I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 3 pm EST (and maybe again later that half hour) to discuss the NL Gold Glove Award winners. There’s at least one awful oversight on par with Franklin Gutierrez from the AL awards. Klawchat is on for tomorrow at 1 pm EST.

Ian Sansom’s The Case of the Missing Books is the first in the “Mobile Library” series of pseudo-detective novels, but wasn’t good enough to get me to attack the second book (which one of you mentioned in the comments on the last post was unreadable anyway). The story revolves around sad-sack librarian Israel Armstrong, a Jewish vegetarian from London who takes a librarian job in a rural Irish town, sight unseen, only to find that the job has changed to one overseeing a mobile library, and that all fifteen thousand books have gone missing. This leads Israel to play detective – badly – to try to find them.

For the most part Sansom just borrows gags from other writers or, in the case of all the bathroom humor, from time immemorial. The vegetarian-served-a-meal-of-meat gag? (Saw that in Everything is Illuminated, and it wasn’t funny then, either.) The blue-collar guy with an unexpected interest in classic literature? The driver who can’t seem to keep his car on the road? Jokes about Israel’s name? There was very little original humor in the book, and with a pretty thin plot – halfway through the book, Israel is barely settled in the town of Tundrum, and I wouldn’t say he makes any progress in the case until the final 50-60 pages – there’s nothing left to sustain the book. It’s a quick read because of all the dialogue, and some of the dialogue is quick and snappy, but it raises the question of whether Sansom can write decent prose, and some of the dialogue brings an unnecessary level of detail around ordinary events in Israel’s day.

Next review will be much more positive, though – Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 4, 2009
→ By

Tree of Smoke.

I know the site’s been flaky today. The server is fine but WordPress is hanging up and I’ve had to have hosting company restart it twice.

I’ll be on Mike & Mike in the Morning on Wednesday at 7:40 am EST, after which, I’m going on vacation for a week, so this will probably be the last post here till Veterans’ Day. And – in case that wasn’t clear enough – there will be no Klawchat this week.

So, Tree of Smoke … 614 pages, read the whole damn thing, still have no idea what the point was, why I care about any of the characters or who the main character even was, what any of the threads had to do with each other, and why author Denis Johnson’s prose was so disjointed, mixing florid descriptions with poorly used profanity. (In fact, given that most of the novel is set in Vietnam during the war, I actually expected more profanity.) There’s no plot. Stories don’t start and end; we get the middle, sort of, and then somebody dies, and it’s over. The novel is full of allusions to the Bible, and a few references to other religions, but none of them made any sense to me on their own or in clarifying the point of the book. I thought I caught a few continuity issues in some of the subplots, but it’s possible that I was too bored to remember what was going on.

I could probably do a better job of taking this novel apart, but by the time I finished last night I wanted nothing more to do with it, and besides, this review from the Atlantic does a much, much better job than I could have hoped to do, even if I’d started the book with the intention of verbally lighting it on fire.

Anyway, I actually just finished the audiobook version of SuperFreakonomics, which was fantastic, but that review will have to wait till after the vacation. I will say that the brouhaha over the global warming chapter seems misplaced, and I’m guessing the critics haven’t read the entire chapter.

The reading list for the vacation – I probably won’t read all of these, but I have a minor phobia of running out of books – includes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Remains of the Day, The Case of the Missing Books, Cold Comfort Farm, and And a Bottle of Rum.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ October 27, 2009
→ By

Revolutionary Road.

I’ll be on 1080 the Fan in Portland Oregon tonight around 5:40 local time, and on AllNight with Jason Smith in the small hours. Tomorrow I’ll be on the Herd at 12:10 pm EDT. Look for my World Series preview piece on ESPN.com around midday.

—

Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, which made the TIME 100, portrays the fraying marriage of Frank and April Wheeler in mundane detail, highlighting their mutual contempt and the cruel manner in which they treat one another (and ignore their kids), until an unexpected event accelerates their downward spiral into an inevitable (and, I thought, rather predictable) climax.

The Wheelers have recently moved to a Connecticut suburb from which Frank commutes to an unchallenging, uninteresting job in Manhattan, and the move further away from city life and culture has only widened the cracks that were already appearing in their relationship. When April appears in a community theater production – which is, individually and collectively, a small disaster, a symbol of the thriving city culture they’ve abandoned for the superficial yet hollow suburbs – her contempt for her husband surfaces in her language and tone:

“Well,” he said, “the thing is, I already said we could. I mean I just saw them out there and I said we would.”
“Oh. Then would you mind going out again and saying you were mistaken? That should be simple enough.”
“Look,” he said. “Don’t start getitng this way. The point is I thought it might be fun, is all. Besides, it’s going to look kind of rude, isn’t it? I mean isn’t it?”
“You mean you won’t.” She closed her eyes. “All right, I will, then. Thanks a lot.”

Very little happens in Revolutionary Road; Frank has an affair, but it’s almost preordained, and the other significant events that have shaped the Wheelers’ lives exist only in flashbacks, until the Big Thing that leads to the book’s conclusion. The novel is instead driven forward by dialogue and Yates’ clever, meandering prose:

It looked, as John Givings had once said, like a place where people lived – a place where the difficult, intricate process of living could sometimes give rise to incredible harmonies of happiness and sometimes to near-tragic disorder, as well as to ludicrous minor interludes (“That’s All, Folks!”); a place where it was possible for whole summers to be kind of crazy, where it was possible to feel lonely and confused in many ways and for things to look pretty bleak from time to time, but where everything, in the final analysis, was going to be all right.

Yates appears to have taken his nomenclature seriously. Frank is excessively so, candid to the point of speaking against self-interest, as if his internal censor has been shut off permanently. April’s name is more ironic, as she feels like she should be in the springtime of her life but is trapped by an unwanted marriage and two children for whom she feels no affection. They live on the Revolutionary Road of the book’s title, referring both to the sexual revolution (which only accelerated after the book’s publication in 1960) and the economic revolution of postwar America, including the flight to the suburbs that ensnares the Wheelers and intensifies their alienation from each other and from society.

The ending to Revolutionary Road was, as I said above, quite predictable – Yates foreshadows the hell out of it – and I always find it hard to read about marriages of contempt and cruelty. I’m sure this relationship exists all over the place, and I have seen married couples speak to each other as Frank and April do, without love or tenderness, through gritted teeth meant to barely disguise the lack of respect, but it remains very hard to take even when it’s well-written.

Next up: I’m more than a third of the way through Tree of Smoke and I’m still not quite sure what the point of it is.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: ,
→ October 22, 2009
→ By

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread.

The title of Don Robertson’s The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread may make you think it’s the story of Matt Wieters, but it’s actually a remarkable coming-of-age novel set in Cleveland in 1944 on the day of the Cleveland East Ohio Gas Explosion.

The protagonist, nine-year-old Morris Bird III, decides to break with his quiet, slightly nerdy childhood routine one day to go visit a former schoolmate of his who moved to the other side of town. He comes up with a rather sophisticated plan to walk there, unwillingly taking his six-year-old sister with him, only to run into one of the largest industrial disasters in American history. What happens next, in maybe the last quarter or fifth of the book, is absolutely amazing, a brilliantly rendered portrait of heroism writ small against an unspeakably large tragedy. Robertson focuses on the little details – what Morris does, while heroic, isn’t huge or unrealistic, but still important, and Robertson imbues him with just one “super” power: the ability to think clearly in a crisis.

Robertson switches back and forth between narrative styles, from a straightforward prose/dialogue format to an almost modernist style where he shifts scenes and characters without so much as a paragraph break. These latter digressions are short, short enough that they didn’t drive me nuts, and the way he works in the creeping gas leak – as if the gas itself is just another character, wending its way through the gutters on its daily rounds – mimics the insidious nature of the threat, to which all the actors in the drama are oblivious until the explosion occurs.

Anyway, I know a few of you read this along with me, so rather than monopolize the topic, I’ll offer some discussion points. Feel free to add your own.

* Morris’ parents are little more than ciphers in the book; his father really only appears as a disembodied voice (a God symbol?) and his mother appears rather ineffectual in her brief cameos. Why?

* I thought of the red wagon as a symbol of Morris’ innocence, both for how it’s destroyed and, although this might be a bit cynical, how it’s obtained (or hard-earned).

* What’s the significance of Morris’s name? Morris, without a diminutive, is certainly a “grown-up” name. Does “Bird” just symbolize his flight across town, or is there more to it? And why would Robertson make him a “the third?”

* Am I the only one who found it odd that Edna Frost couldn’t think of an alternate spelling of Morris’ last name? It was the one off note in the book for me.

* Stephen King has apparently called Robertson one of his three greatest influences. For those of you who’ve read King’s work, did you see echoes of King in Sliced Bread?

—

Up next: I finished Revolutionary Road today, and I’m starting Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (on sale for $6.40 at amazon.com) tonight.

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

Hangover Square.

Sorry for the disappearing act, but it was a long and hectic week in Arizona. I’ll be on the Herd at 11:10 am EDT on Wednesday, and on Mile High Sports 1510 in Denver at 8:25 am MDT.

He walked through Castle Square to the sea. When he reached the sea he saw that dawn was breaking over it, dimly, bluely, feebly, amidst the torn clouds of rain. He smelt the air and felt better. He was glad he had done this. He felt like a walk. He was doing the best thing.
And then he felt a curious snap in his head.

Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, part of the Bloomsbury 100, is an overlooked work from the playwright behind the movies Rope (famous for director Alfred Hitchcock’s use of long takes with disguised cuts) and Gaslight, a psychological novel of a different sort: The protagonist is suffering from what we’d now call dissociative identity disorder*, and one of his personalities wants to murder the woman his other personality loves.

*Dissociative identity disorder is, according to one theory, a reaction to childhood trauma, such as abuse, but Hamilton depicts Bone’s split personality as something he’s had from birth.

George Harvey Bone’s primary personality is the saddest of sacks, a social outcast who spends his time following a group of libertines who abuse him verbally but are all too happy to take advantage of his occasional flush periods. The group includes Netta, an aspiring actress who is neither that talented nor that driven and is primarily hoping for luck or fate to hand her a big break. Bone is in love with her – or perhaps with the idea of her – and she plays with his emotions in a cruel, sadistic manner. Bone’s secondary personality is monomaniacal in its drive to kill Netta, realizing that she is the obstacle to Bone (or his primary personality) getting on with his life.

Hamilton was criticizing the seemingly impermeable barrier between social classes in interwar England, with Netta and her friends exploiting Bone when it suits them but refusing him full entry into their social circle. (Of course, part of their disdain for Bone is what they call his “dumb moods,” when he has actually clicked over to the secondary personality.) That subtext was obvious, but I’ve read several references to Hamilton also depicting fascism through the story, and I just don’t see it. It’s a good thriller, one where Bone’s murderous desires are made a little morally ambiguous by the rotten treatment he receives at the hands of the heartless Netta, and creeping fascism does receives its mentions (through Netta’s sort-of beau, Peter), but I’m hesitant to put more metaphor into the story than Hamilton intended.

The version of Hangover Square currently in print is full of unfortunate typos, and I’m not sure whether they’re from the original text or just sloppy editing by the new publisher. Some errors were unintentionally funny, like roadside “sinposts” (I assume you find those on the Highway to Hell) or, after a phone has been ringing for a while, “at last there was an answering dick,” without actually explaining who the dick was. (Sam Spade, perhaps? Philip Marlowe?)

Next up: I finished The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread while in Arizona; is anyone still reading it, or should I post a writeup with some discussion questions for those who already did? I’ve since moved on to Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.

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