→ September 7, 2011
→ By

Pulp.

I waited until that night, drove over, parked outside. Nice neighborhood. Definition of a nice neighborhood: a place you couldn’t afford to live in.

Charles Bukowski wrote his final novel, Pulp, as he was dying of leukemia, and passed away before the book was published. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise then that the overarching theme of the book is death – facing it, fleeing from it, and wondering what there is to life other than speeding towards it.

The protagonist of Pulp, Nick Belane, is a private detective who is simultaneously lucky (his cases have a habit of solving themselves) and down on his luck (he’s somewhat broke and usually heading to the bottom of a bottle) when he receives a visit from a new client, who calls herself Lady Death, and most likely is the Grim Reaper in more attractive form than we’re using to seeing. She wants Belane (which I presume rhymes with “Spillane”) to track down a man she believes to be the French author Celine, who should be dead by about thirty years but is apparently running around Los Angeles. Nick picks up a few more clients, including a man who believes his controlling new girlfriend is a space alien, another man who believes his wife is cheating on him, and a friend who hires him to find the elusive Red Sparrow but doesn’t actually know what it is. (The Red Sparrow is most likely a reference to Black Sparrow Press, a small publisher whose financial support allowed Bukowski to become a full-time writer at age 45.)

On its surface, Pulp is a hard-boiled detective novel reminiscent of the clipped tones of Hammett and tight yet rich prose of Chandler, although Belane’s toughness is more superficial than that of the Continental Op or Philip Marlowe. Belane bemoans his inability to catch a break in between catching breaks, dropping into deep depressions that last until the next barstool, where he typically orders a few drinks, starts a fight, and leaves more or less victorious. Clients find him, as do clues, yet he still manages to encounter no end of trouble, much of it because of his own bad decisions.

In between drinks and fights, Belane muses on the nature of life and often doesn’t like what he sees, looking at the indignities of this mortal coil from bodily functions to the need for money to questioning his own sanity. One of the book’s most memorable scenes puts Belane in the waiting room for a psychiatrist he wants to question; the waiting room is full of apparently crazy people, but when Belane’s name is called and he’s ushered in, the apparent psychiatrist claims he’s just a lawyer and Belane is yet another crazy person who’s entered the wrong office. Is Belane crazy? Did he black out? Did reality change on him, as it has a habit of doing to him throughout the book?

As much as Belane looks at life and cringes at what he sees, he’s not running headlong into death, even though Lady Death tells him a few times that he’ll be seeing her again soon. But it’s his inner monologue that really makes Pulp memorable and often very funny in a wry sort of way; it’s an accumulation of decades of wisdom, much of it not all that useful, wrapped up in a fast-paced detective story where the ultimate case is solving the mystery of life. I won’t spoil the ending, although you can probably figure out where the book is heading, and even so the plot is hardly the thing there. Bukowski managed to pay homage to my favorite genre through a black-comic look at the end of life. It’s quite an achievement.

Next up: Richard Stark’s heist novel The Score, available as a free eBook for the Kindle (or Kindle iPad app) through that link. Stark was one of Donald Westlake’s pen names, and I reviewed the first novel in this series two years ago.

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→ August 12, 2011
→ By

The Corrections.

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections made the TIME list of the 100 greatest novels published since the magazine began for its use of dark humor in an unstinting portrayal of both the modern American family and of our unending winter of discontent. It is a well-constructed novel with smart prose, one that challenges the reader often without becoming an arduous read, but ultimately suffers from its depressing outlook and the presence of only one really compelling storyline.

The Lambert family is in the final stages of full collapse as its patriarch, Alfred, approaches the end of his life, and his wife Enid seeks to bring all three of her adult children home to St. Jude, Ohio, for one final Christmas together. Alfred suffers from Parkinson’s disease that is ravaging body and mind, yet lives in partial denial of the loss of some of his faculties while living in full denial of what appears to be a lifelong battle with clinical depression. Enid herself fights a depression of her own, but one more the result of her own losing battle with a sullen, domineering husband, who clipped her wings and may have driven away all three children once they could leave the nest. Eldest son Gary is superficially successful, married with three children and a lucrative day job in banking, but is himself depressed; he’s aware of it, unlike Alfred, but tries desperately to fight it without resorting to therapy or antidepressants (although the cause of his aversion to those solutions is unclear; it may be related to his paranoia about his wife and children conspiring against him). Middle child Chip is a failed academic, a tourist of Marxism, and eventually an aide to a Lithuanian con man. If you like a single one of these characters, each of whom (except perhaps Enid, a product of her times) is at least partly responsible for his own mess, you’re a more empathetic reader than I am.

The star of the book for me is the youngest Lambert child, Denise, a talented chef with a second talent for romantic entanglements that sabotage her life and eventually leave her jobless and, coincidentally, available to clean up family messes. I’d argue that she’s the most together of any family member, certainly the most self-aware and most willing to think about what causes her bouts of self-destructive behavior, and the job loss was a little bit forced into the plot anyway. (The absence of any mention of a sexual harassment lawsuit bothered me.) Each character gets his or her own extended section, and Denise’s was by far the most interesting, both from sheer narrative greed and from my ability to empathize with her character, because she has a level of emotional depth absent from other members of her family, and less of the propensity to extinguish her own flame. And the lead-in to that section, giving us the back story on the family that ends up employing Denise in the husband’s restaurant start-up, is the single best passage in the entire book, even thought it doesn’t feature any of the Lamberts. Incidentally, Franzen, to his great credit, shows pretty strong understanding of food and food trends of ten years ago in describing Denise’s culinary exploits, including her gustatory tour of Europe that leads to, of course, some significant emotional development, particularly when she sees acquaintances from St. Jude living a wealthy yet stale life in Austria.

The book is funny and crude, sometimes at the same time, but other times the crudeness is simply offputting and pointless. Franzen can spin a phrase and make words dance in many directions, and it’s a shame to see how often he makes them tango in the gutter when he excels at wry, incisive observations. The strongest prose got me through the book despite a rather bleak outlook on life. The emotions generated by the book’s brief concluding section were very real, and yet I still felt cheated, like this final “correction” to the Lambert family dysfunction came too late – after 550 pages of downers, chemical and psychological, I wanted some small glimmer of hope for the Lamberts left standing, some argument that life, corrected, still had meaning, and Franzen just left it hanging. But if his point was to display our happiness paradox, where greater prosperity in the U.S. hasn’t led to greater happiness or satisfaction or reduced rates of clinical depression, then that open-ended conclusion serves his greater purpose. It just wasn’t the book I wanted to read.

Next up: I’m about ¾ of the way through Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Orange Prize-winning book Half of a Yellow Sun, a historical novel set during the Nigerian-Biafran war of 1967-70.

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→ July 2, 2011
→ By

The Loved One, Winesburg, Ohio, and The Wapshot Chronicle.

Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One was at least the most fun to read of the three books, even if it doesn’t quite have the others’ literary standing. This was Waugh’s first novel published after what is today considered his masterwork, Brideshead Revisited, but is more of a return to the satirical comic novels that fill most of his bibliography.

In The Loved One, Dennis Barlow, a young English “poet” who seems incapable of writing two lines of quality verse is working at a pet crematorium in Los Angeles when his benefactor, the screenwriter Sir Francis Hinley, is sacked by the studio that employs him and promptly hangs himself. While arranging for Sir Francis’ interment, Dennis meets Aimée Thanatogenos, the cosmetologist who applies makeup to the corpses before their viewings. He pursues her as she is also pursued by Mr. Joyboy, the prissy embalmer who still lives with his imperious (and somewhat batty) old mother.

The Loved One clocks in at a scant 164 pages, but within that length Waugh packs in enough mockery for a book of twice its length. Waugh had spent time in Southern California working on the adaptation of Brideshead and the bulk of the satire in the earlier part of this book is aimed at Hollywood, both its industry and the area’s way of life. Once Hinley is summarily dispatched, which leads to a hilariously morbid conversation on the proper procedure for fixing up and displaying the corpse of such a suicide, Waugh turns his firepower toward the American death industry, with a tour of the “Whispering Glades” cemetery that is so fatuous it would seem absurd if it didn’t tie so closely to reality.

If there’s a flaw in The Loved One it’s a question of what Dennis sees in Aimée, who is rather a dim bulb and doesn’t bring anything to the table other than looks. En route to blasting the American film and mortuary industries and the superficiality he saw in American culture at the time, he stinted a little on character development, and when one-third of the love triangle dies, there’s no emotion involved – although, of course, it does generate a few more twisted laughs. It’s not as funny as Scoop or Decline and Fall, but if you enjoy a vicious satire it’s still one of the funnier books I’ve read this year.

–

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio appears incongruously at #24 on the Modern Library list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, since it’s not actually a novel but a short story cycle revolving around the residents of the rural town of the book’s title. (That’s not the list’s only error; the book at #8, Darkness at Noon, was originally published in German. And it doesn’t include Beloved. But I digress.) Anderson’s work was a landmark in American realism with frank treatment of sex, religion, drink, and depression, but like many books that break barriers it reads as dated today because the stories underneath this realistic treatment are so often thin.

Anderson begins the book by explaining that each story that follows is about a character he calls a “grotesque,” someone feeling the loneliness and isolation of life in a small town, each for his own unusual reasons. These are merely slices of life, a glimpse at a character and a back story, but often very little in the present; the only story that moves beyond that is the four-part mini-cycle called “Godliness” that traces one family through several generations and the disappointment of the patriarch in the lack of a male heir to his nonexistent throne. One character, the young reporter George Willard, who gravitates toward an escape to wider horizons as the book goes on, perhaps because he alone sees the whole town for its limits and the unavoidable ennui of a place with such narrow horizons. He never gives the reader insight into the town’s social structure, and while the town itself is the one aspect tying all the stories together, even its physical layout is only evident from the map provided before the first page. I didn’t love Winesburg, Ohio, and I didn’t hate it, but I think I’ll have a hard time remembering it because of how little actually occurs, and how the loneliness of the characters never fully came through for me.

–

John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle (#63 on that Modern Library list) is a tragicomic novel about the family of that name struggling with life in their Massachusetts fishing village as their circumstances change, the world changes, and their two sons strike off to make their way outside of the confines of the small town where they grew up. The book’s most central character is Leander, the family’s father, who decides at this late stage of his life to try his hand at writing and begins keeping a journal filled with sentence fragments and a mildly comic mix of the mundane and the sad, particularly where his own emasculation (a comment on the rise of feminism in our society?) becomes evident, foreshadowing the book’s final passages.

One chapter stood out for the wrong reasons, in which one of the Wapshot sons, Coverly, struggles with feelings of bisexuality. Itt felt completely tacked on – the subject is never broached before or after that one chapter, and it begins with a warning that readers might wish to skip to the next one. It felt to me like some editor told Cheever he couldn’t include gay content unless it was cordoned off with flares and pylons for the conservative reader of the 1960s, and that organization makes the subject easy to dismiss. He was much more successful in dealing with the same themes in Falconer.

Waugh and Cheever both mined humor from despair in their books, but where Waugh is biting and acerbic, Cheever is simply sad, watching the decline of Leander as he sees his own potency dissolved by his independent wife and his wealthy and slightly deranged sister while his sons are both held back by the crazy women they chase and marry. Wapshot is undeniably funny and poignant if you can work through the slow passages, but he clearly had better work ahead of him after this debut novel.

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→ June 13, 2011
→ By

A Canticle for Leibowitz.

I’m not sure how I stumbled on Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, a Hugo Award-winning novel from 1961 that depicts a post-apocalyptic earth going through inevitable cycles of progress and regression. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t a reader suggestion, and I very rarely read science fiction, but somehow I added this to my queue about six months ago. I’d say it was worth reading for the obvious influence it had on later works, but found it an arduous read and a damn depressing one at that.

In Canticle, humanity has nearly wiped itself out through nuclear war, but survivors are rebuilding civilization or simply banding together in tribes habitable areas. The Catholic Church figures heavily in Miller’s book (he was Roman Catholic as well), and serves as a preserver not just of morality and faith but of knowledge after the remaining masses rise up against the intelligentsia, especially scientists, in retaliation for the unleashing of the destructive power of the atom, a passage that unfortunately presaged the real-life genocide of intellectuals in Cambodia under Pol Pot. As humanity moves forward again in fits and starts, the role of the Church changes in society in an exploration of the relationship between small-c church and institutions such as state and science.

The novel is actually a collation of three novellas, each depicting a different time period beginning about six hundred years after the nuclear holocaust, but all centered on a Catholic abbey in the Rocky Mountains dedicated to Saint Leibowitz, a former electric engineer who joined the clergy after the war and gave his life to preserve pre-war scientific knowledge. In the first section, a meek monk-in-training accidentally discovers a fallout shelter that may hold the remains of Saint Leibowitz’ wife, as well as other artifacts from his time deemed by the Church to hold great historical importance. In the second section, an agnostic scholar and researcher visits the abbey as one of the monks is preparing to demonstrate the first (post-war) electric lamp. In the third part, the abbey prepares to send several of its monks to a human colony on Alpha Centauri bearing both ecclesiastical “Memorabilia” and secular knowledge to escape an impending second nuclear war, bringing about a debate between the abbot and a nonreligious doctor over euthanasia for victims of the first attack. Through all three books a Jewish wanderer appears, perhaps the same person despite the span of centuries, waiting for the Messiah while assisting (sometimes in peculiar ways) one or more of the monks.

The three epochs demonstrated in the book mirror three major periods in modern human history – the pre-Enlightenment period where the church’s primacy in civilization and in the advancement of knowledge was largely unchallenged; the Enlightenment itself, where science took away domains of learning previously belonging to the church; and the twentieth century, with nuclear weapons, the repetition of past calamities, and, in what I presume was Miller’s view, a loss of morality tied to the gradual withdrawal of religion from the center of everyday life.

As a social document or a theological one, I imagine the book holds great value; Wikipedia – which we know is never wrong – mentions “a significant body of literary criticism, including numerous literature journal articles, books and college courses” around Canticle. That doesn’t make it a compelling read even if it might be an important one, and the lack of compelling or sympathetic characters left the text feeling more like a history than a great novel. I would imagine from the descriptions of both the local setting of the abbey and the state of humanity and its governance that the book had a heavy influence in literature and literary offshoots after its publication; On the Beach followed two years later, and the world described in part one of Canticle reminded me more than once of the post-apocalyptic setting of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Although I never got into role-playing games, I remember trying one from the 1980s called Gamma World that had to be drawn in part from Miller’s work or its literary progeny, and I’d imagine Wasteland and Fallout (which I’ve never played) drew either straight from Canticle or from it by way of Gamma World.

Influence or importance might get me to read a book, and Miller’s formal prose wasn’t as unbearable as that of Henry James or Theodore Dreiser. But I couldn’t give this much of a recommendation to anyone who reads strictly for pleasure.

Next up: J.P. Donleavy’s comic novel The Ginger Man.

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→ May 30, 2011
→ By

The Fixer.

New mock draft is up. Updated top 25 pro prospects list goes up on Tuesday, followed by another projected first round on Friday.

Free Brandon Belt.

–

”So sleep now, without fear for your life, and if you should ever manage to get out of prison, keep in mind that the purpose of freedom is to create it for others.”

Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1967, a bit surprising given the award’s focus on works that deal with the American experience. The Fixer is a fictionalized account of the arrest and trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Russian Jew falsely accused of the murder of a young Ukrainian boy for the purposes of some arcane blood ritual. Malamud indicated that Bok was also inspired by the Dreyfuss and Vanzetti affairs, but the case in his novel is undeniably Beilis’.

The fixer of the title is Yakov Bok, a Jewish carpenter who leaves the countryside for the city of Kiev after his wife leaves him for another man. While in Kiev, he finds a job working for an anti-Semitic factory owner, with an apartment included in a district forbidden to Jews. When the boy’s corpse is discovered, Bok – who had once chased the boy out of the factory’s brickyard – becomes an unlikely suspect given the accusations because he’s alienated from God and his own religion, but he finds himself steamrolled in a Kafka-esque legal process designed to produce a confession or a guilty verdict.

While in prison for the remainder of the book – the novel ends as Bok heads for his long-delayed trial – the fixer endures numerous physical and psychological torments, but finds or develops an inner strength that previous to his arrest he lacked or simply didn’t know he had. Even through attempts to dehumanize him and force him to confess, he retains some vestige of freedom by choosing not to submit – the only choice he’s allowed in the unconscionable conditions of his imprisonment. That becomes his victory even before the ultimate victory of an acquittal. (Beilis was acquitted amid an international outcry over his arrest and trial; Dreyfuss was also exonerated after Émile Zola’s famous “J’accuse!” editorial. Vanzetti and his co-conspirator Sacco were executed, although their guilt is still in question; shortly before Malamud wrote The Fixer, historian Francis Russell published a major book on the case called Tragedy in Dedham that concluded that Vanzetti was innocent.)

Malamud’s work covered not just anti-Semitism but prejudice, injustice, corruption, and mob mentality in the midst of the U.S. civil rights movement and barely two decades after the end of the Holocaust while also exploring how the human spirit can survive in unbearable circumstances. Bok himself is harsh and unlikable during the brief period before his arrest, but becomes sympathetic because of the cartoonishly evil nature of his captors. (His one ally of sorts is eliminated far too soon from the novel’s pages, making most of the book’s second half even bleaker than the first.) But despite the often graphic descriptions of Bok’s life in solitary confinement and the faint hope of any redemption or rescue, The Fixer was compelling because of its bigger themes, ones that probably apply just as well in Bosnia or Rwanda or even today in the Middle East. Malamud’s irreligious Jew stands in for every oppressed people throughout human history.

Incidentally, Beilis himself wrote a memoir of his imprisonment and trial called The Story of My Sufferings that appears to be long out of print and probably in the public domain. I imagine it’s a difficult read, but I hope its historical significance encourages some e-book publisher to put it out there in electronic form.

Next up: I won’t have much time to read this week, so I picked Graham Greene’s brief “entertainment” The Captain and the Enemy.

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→ April 30, 2011
→ By

Home & A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

My latest top 50 ranking for this year’s Rule 4 Draft is up. I’ll also be back on College Baseball Live this Thursday night at 7 pm EDT and on the postgame show as well.

—

The old man nodded. “Maybe I’m finding out I’m not such a good man as I thought I was. Now that I don’t have the strength – patience takes a lot out of you. Hope, too.”
Jack said, “I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all. Except–” he shrugged and laughed “–what you can’t be rid of.”

She’s only written three books, but Marilynne Robinson has to be in any discussion of the best living American novelists, and there is no living writer whose prose I’d rather read. Saying a writer writes “from the heart” can be like saying a player “sees the ball well,” but Robinson produces some of the most moving, heartfelt scenes and passages I’ve ever seen and does so without the excess of sentiment or cloying language that could turn a book with a similar setup into mass-market chick lit.

Home, currently on sale for $10 through that amazon link, is the parallel novel to Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead. (It’s worth mentioning that Robinson’s three novels have each won a major award – Housekeeping won the PEN/Faulkner award for the best debut novel of its year and Home won the Orange Prize for the best English novel written by a female author.) Gilead was a series of notes or journal entries from an older priest named Ames who, nearing his death, wishes to leave a testament for his young son. That journal also showed scenes of his complex relationship with his friend and fellow preacher Robert Boughton and Boughton’s prodigal son Jack, named for Ames, who returns to Gilead after a twenty-year absence. That return is the subject of Home, as Jack, a lifelong alcoholic who didn’t even come back for his mother’s funeral, shows up carrying two decades’ worth of secrets and memories, with arguably four decades’ worth of loneliness and sorry as well. His timing is propitious, with his father’s health declining even more rapidly than Ames’, and Jack’s sister, Glory, living at home again after a disastrous courtship that has left her resigned to spinsterhood.

Despite the presence of just three characters for most of the book, with everyone else accounting for maybe 10% of the dialogue and whatever passes for action in a Robinson novel (she has never in three books resorted to plot twists or other tricks of the trade to spice up the story), Home is Robinson’s most complex work. The developing relationship between Jack and Glory, separated by enough years that they were never close as children, is one side of a highway where the other direction contains the gradual yet accelerating deterioration of the relationship between Jack and the dying father who has confused decades of worry over his wayward son with decades of love; it’s not clear that anyone was or is capable of helping Jack, who has what would today most likely be diagnosed as depression, but Boughton, already starting to lose control of his emotions in the earliest stages of dementia, faces the crushing disappointment of seeing the failure and tragedy of Jack’s life incarnate, in his kitchen or his living room. And yet Jack, first welcomed and then rebuked by his own father, draws closer to the old man and to his sister … but never so close that he can make the place he refers to as “home” his actual home, instead revisiting the childhood feeling that he wished he lived there in spirit rather than simply in body.

That dualism symbolizes one of Robinson’s central themes, the gulf between our spiritual selves (or souls) and our corporeal existence. Robinson writes honestly of religion, or more specifically of religiosity, as her many religious characters are neither caricatured nor placed on pedestals; religion is simply intrinsic to their lives, and Home is suffused with conflicts between religious tenets and human behavior, as well as the doubts that have plagued Jack for his entire life, further isolating him (although it was far from the main reason) from a family of believers.

And part of Robinson’s gift is that she can write about religion without creating an overtly religious novel. Home is very much about life on earth, about the weight of memories, about choices gone awry in the distant past with ramifications in the present day. Glory’s broken engagement has left her back at home, unemployed, and without romantic prospects; one of the most heart-rending scenes comes near the book’s end as she remembers her own daydreams about her own future family, about children that will probably never exist, a warmth and happiness that she feels is now permanently denied to her. (I don’t believe the characters’ ages are mentioned, but Glory is probably in her early 30s, and I suppose in a small Midwestern town in the 1950s this would make her marriage prospects fairly slim.) Jack, meanwhile, slowly exposes layers of his sorrow to Glory, but not to his father, a permanent barrier to the old man understanding his son; the woman who helped Jack get back on his feet and remain at least partially sober for the past ten years is now denied to him, a severance that seems to have driven him back to Gilead and, in his mind, has cut him off from salvation in this life or any other. Unfolding these relationships in a way that gets at the heart of family dynamics, of loneliness, of regret, and of the ultimate comfort of home without ever relying on unrealistic plot twists to force characters into false corners is more evidence of Robinson’s mastery of language and of character. She went 25 years between her first and second novels but just three years between Gilead and Home; I can only hope the gap before her next novel is as short as the last.

–

Flannery O’Conner’s first short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, is even more theologically-minded than Robinson’s work, combining stories about the meaning of faith, salvation, and what it might mean to be “good.” The stories are largely twisted, even macabre, as in the title story where an escaped convict wipes out an entire family so O’Conner can show us the difference between saying you’re a good person (or, more specifically, a good Christian) and actually being one. O’Conner dreams up killers and con artists, thieves and rascals, putting “good” people in bad situations to see how they might react.

Aside from the notable title story, the most interesting to me was the longest story in the book, “The Displaced Person,” about a rather high-minded Southern widow named Mrs. McIntyre who takes in, under some duress, a family of Jewish refugees from Poland who fled the Nazis. Her ignorance of conditions in Europe at the time is particularly stark to us now, given the passage of time and our deeper understanding of the extent of the genocide and the horrible conditions in and outside of the camps for Jews. But her lack of charity and her unusually defined ideas on race/origin stood out for her post hoc construction of ethnic identities; even as the Jewish husband works harder, without complaint, than anyone else she’s ever had on her farm, she is appalled to find him trying to bring over relatives trapped in German death camps and potentially marry them off to black workers on the farm. The priest who organized the placement of the refugees is no help, as he’s a single-minded, simpering man who sees Mrs. McIntyre only as a shell, as a person to be saved and as a settlement place for the refugee family but not as an individual, an oversight that leads to the story’s ultimate tragedy. That climax is one of the strongest depictions I’ve seen of the banality of evil, a phrase which, not coincidentally, was coined to describe the complicity of German citizens with the Nazi’s plans for extermination of Jews and other minorities.

Anyway, the title of this collection inspired me to create my second Tumblr post.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s English-language debut novel, A Wild Sheep Chase.

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→ April 20, 2011
→ By

Taft.

Just recorded my one Baseball Today podcast of the week – I’ve had to skip two due to early-morning flights. Also, Thursday’s chat will take place after I get off the College Baseball Live set, at either 7:30 pm or 8 pm EDT, because (weather permitting) I’m seeing Javier Baez play at the usual chat time.

—

In an afterword to her second novel, Taft, Ann Patchett laments its status as her least-known novel even though she’s extremely fond of it, a situation she credits to everything from the title (admittedly not the optimal choice) to the way it was superseded by her later works, notably the mesmerizing Bel Canto. But Taft showcases Patchett’s skill for characterization as well as her beautiful yet readable prose, and compares favorably to the novels that came before and after it. (Her most recent novel, Run, was by far her worst effort.)

The Taft of the book’s title is already dead before the book begins. Ray Taft was a husband and father of two in a rural town in eastern Tennessee who died of a heart attack, leaving his family emotionally adrift and buried in bills. His wife, daughter, and son move to Memphis to live with their wealthy aunt and uncle, but the daughter, Fay, chooses to work and ends up in the bar run by the narrator, former blues drummer John Nickel, a black man more than ten years her senior. Nickel gives Fay a job and ends up enmeshed in her new domestic drama, largely revolving around her brother, Carl, for whom the loss of his father has meant the loss of an anchor and a descent into increasingly serious trouble. Meanwhile, Nickel himself is grappling with his own loss, as his ex-girlfriend has moved to Miami with their seven-year-old son, Franklin, leaving him with limited contact with his only child.

The present-day stories of Fay/Carl and Nickel/Franklin are interrupted by what are either flashbacks or Nickel’s own interpolations of Taft’s story, including the switch in Fay’s and Carl’s personalities after their father’s death and a poignant scene where Taft interacts with a local boy selling candy door to door to raise money for his school science class.

If there’s a reason for Taft‘s relative lack of success, it might be that the book seemed less substantial than her other novels. The Patron Saint of Liars revolved around a terribly broken woman and the daughter she is destined to disappoint. The Magician’s Assistant is about a woman dealing with the death of her longtime business partner, who could never requite her affection for him. Bel Canto is a masterpiece, a story of hostages and terrorists in a Latin American embassy where, over time, the barrier between captor and captive begins to break down. Major things happen in Taft – if you’re familiar with Chekhov, you’ll see the biggest event coming a mile away – but the results aren’t that different from what preceded the big stuff. Characters aren’t much changed, and little is resolved at the end of the book. I was fine with that because it’s a well-written slice of life, but if you like your novels to come with firm beginnings and ends and a cherry on top, this isn’t the book for you. And that’s fine too.

Next up: Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. She might have been the original Debbie Downer.

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→ March 28, 2011
→ By

Dog Soldiers.

Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers won the National Book Award in 1974 and made the TIME 100 ranking, although I haven’t seen or heard it mentioned outside of that context. I’m going to guess it’s because the subject matter and setting feel very dated, making its relevance to today’s reader a lot less obvious, but that didn’t make it a less interesting read for me.

The book is populated by hippies, cheats, losers, dropouts, and freaks, set in the waning days of the Vietnam War and the dissolute California society of the age. John Converse is a writer/journalist of dubious credentials based in Vietnam who allows himself to get roped into a transoceanic heroin deal using a friend he calmly describes as “a psychopath” and his own wife as part of the supply chain. When the psychopath, Ray Hicks, and Converse’s wife Marge connect in California it sets off a chase by some bad guys who moonlight as good guys on their days off and an increasingly desperate and irrational attempt to sell the drugs in territory controlled by other suppliers.

Along the way, there’s a healthy dose of unhealthy drug consumption, copious vomiting, and more than a smidgen of violence. Ray and Marge end up in a hippie commune with the dope and more weapons than a Libyan rebel camp, while Converse tries to avoid the dirty cop who wants to bust Ray and Marge but take the drugs for himself. It’s a nihilistic, unsparing look at compromised people descending into a hell of their own making.

Aside from my inability to really place myself in the story – I’ve never tried a drug stronger than alcohol, unless you count chocolate, which I do – I struggled to find a deeper theme below the story. Maybe the heroin isn’t really heroin, but symbolized something deeper, like a search for meaning in something consumable and disposable like money. Maybe the battle over the heroin stands in as a metaphor for the war, a conflict with questionable and short-lived objectives where the cost in lives can never be justified by the results. Maybe it’s about the fickleness of man, how quickly we’ll sell out our friends for a quick fix or financial gain. All of these occurred to me as possibilities while I was reading the book but none were fully developed as themes, leaving Dog Soldiers as a compelling read but one whose plaudits I couldn’t fully explain.

Next up: Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse.

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→ March 14, 2011
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An American Tragedy.

Been busy on the draft blog, with updates on Gerrit Cole, Trevor Bauer, Kyle Gaedele.

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Clyde Griffiths is dead, and it’s about freaking time already. It took Theodore Dreiser over eight hundred pages to tell a story that could have been told in under half that. An American Tragedy is an acknowledged classic, present on four of the top 100 lists I use as reading guides*, but I found it dull, thin, internally implausible (even though it’s based heavily on a true story), and populated by characters who were lucky to receive a second dimension.

*It’s #16 on the Modern Library 100, #88 on the Radcliffe 100, and on the unranked TIME 100, all of which are limited to English-language novels of the 20th century. It’s also #46 on The Novel 100, which covers all novels and is now back in print.

The story, in brief: Clyde Griffiths is raised in poverty by a pair of non-denominational missionary parents, and rejects their lifestyle and religion to strike out on his own. At every turn, his attempts to move himself forward socially and economically are stymied by his attraction to and obsession with the fairer sex. Eventually, he’s taken in by his wealthy uncle and given work in that man’s collar factory, where he meets and seduces a simple country girl, Roberta Allen. When Clyde finds that society girl Sondra Finchley is interested in him, he ditches Roberta to pursue Sondra, only to find out that Roberta is pregnant with his child and (after failed attempts to abort the baby) insists that he marry her. So he hatches a plan to kill Roberta, and Roberta ends up dead even though Clyde may have had a change of heart at the last second. He’s quickly caught, tried at great literary length, and executed. Fin.

It could easily have been a story of great drama, but it’s not. For one thing, most readers of the book know the ending, which was true when it came out because the case on which Dreiser based the novel was a national sensation, the O.J. Simpson trial of its day (except that the defendant was found guilty and executed).

It could also have been a brilliant character study, but poor Clyde is as narrow as Doug Fieger’s tie and has so little nderstanding of his own actions that it’s hard for me to make any convincing case as to his motives. The closest I could come is to label him a narcissist, since he tends to think of everything bad as happening “to him,” notably Roberta’s pregnancy which was most certainly not happening to Clyde in any physical sense.

It doesn’t even work as a polemic. At first it looks like an indictment of religion, or of Puritanism, but that falls by the wayside when Clyde leaves his parents. It could be a criticism of misspent youth, of alcohol, or of venal behavior by “loose” women, but none of those themes sticks around long either. The longest single theme is that of the caste system found in the upstate New York town where Clyde’s uncle and family live, a system that finds Clyde caught in between as the part-owner of a surname associated with success, status, and wealth but himself poor, uneducated, and socially awkward. But then Clyde kills Roberta, gets arrested, and the rich/poor issue is mostly forgotten.

If there’s anything worth pondering in An American Tragedy, it’s whether Clyde was legally guilty of the murder. Clyde sets up the entire crime, then at the last second has some sort of mental apoplexy and doesn’t quite go through with it … but Roberta falls out of the boat, Clyde probably knocks her in the head, and he definitely doesn’t bother to save her as she drowns. Is it murder if he meant it but he didn’t mean it but he meant it anyway? I sure as hell thought so, which made the trial – on which Dreiser spends the better part of 300 pages – as dull as pitcher fielding practice.

And as for the prose, well, Dryser might have been a more appropriate moniker, for the author was no magician with our language, a view to which my friends at TIME also subscribe. The prose wasn’t leaden; it was eka-leaden. To wit:

But in the interim, in connection with his relations with Roberta no least reference to Sondra, although, even when near her in the factory or her room, he could not keep his thoughts from wandering away to where Sondra in her imaginary high social world might be. The while Roberta, at moments only sensing a drift and remoteness in his thought and attitude which had nothing to do with her, was wondering what it was that of late was beginning to occupy him so completely. And he, in his turn, when she was not looking was thinking – supposing? – supposing – (since she had troubled to recall herself to him), that he could interest a girl like Sondra in him?

The whole book is like this, all 353,014 words of it. Another typical Dreiser move is the extended double negative:

Nevertheless she was not at all convinced that a girl of Roberta’s looks and practicality would not be able to negotiate an association of the sort without harm to herself.

You parse that sucker, and get back to me in a week when you’re done.

So … why did I stick it out? For one thing, because it’s on four of those book lists, and while I may not reach 100 on any of them, it pushed me one closer. But it also stood as the last unread novel from my years in school: It was originally assigned to me in my senior year of high school, in the fall of 1989. I got to page 25, hated it, bought the Cliffs Notes, and wrote the paper off that. That’s the same class for which I didn’t read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a book I went back and read in 2005 and loved. I simply can’t say the same for this paperweight.

Next up: Dr. Michael Guillen’s Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics.

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→ January 28, 2011
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Breakfast at Tiffany’s & Fludd.

My list of sleeper prospects for all 30 teams went up this morning for Insiders.

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Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a novella-length character study of the iconic Holly Golightly, the chameleonic protagonist whose ability to reinvent herself and manipulate people to her own benefit charms the milquetoast narrator.

Holly is a very young, independent-minded woman who takes a flat in a Manhattan brownstone where the unnamed narrator, dubbed “Fred” by Holly, also lives. She fascinates him through her force of will, her expectation that people will jump to meet her every whim (they often do), and through how men just fall hopelessly for her like dominoes in a line. (Fred’s affection for Holly always seems to be of the arm’s-length variety, and I thought the character, like Capote, was gay.) Her anchorless life hits a snag when a piece of her old life shows up out of the blue to try to drag her out of her high-society ways to a backwoods existence she never wanted in the first place.

Capote was a prose master, with Norman Mailer issuing the oft-repeated statement that he “would not have changed two words in” this story, but the line that caught my eye was because it reminded me of a television program:

…I noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out a girl who ran up the steps of the Forty-second Street Public Library. She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make. I let curiosity guide me between the lions…

I’ve tried to find out of the makers of the children’s show Between the Lions took their name from the book, but have had no success. Naming a show about literacy after a phrase from an American literary giant seems fitting, though.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is usually sold along with three Capote short stories: “House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory.” The first two are ordinary, the first about a prostitute in Haiti who finds an escape to what might be a better life, the latter about two unlikely friends at a southern prison camp (one of whom is named Tico Feo, which means “ugly Costa Rican.”) The third story is a marvel, a peer to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s canon of short stories, a sweet but wholly unsentimental tale about the friendship between a young boy and an cousin in her 60s, and how the two would make and sell fruitcakes every Christmas season. We often praise players who recognize their skill sets and their limitations by saying that they “don’t try to do too much.” In “A Christmas Story,” Capote didn’t try to do too much. He lets the story do it for him.

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Hilary Mantel’s Fludd is a strange piece of fiction, a short novel about a curate assigned to a small, backwards English town where Catholicism is practiced by means of superstition rather than faith and the priest has lost his own belief and probably his marbles as well. The curate, however, isn’t what he at first seems to be, and as the novel goes along one of the nuns emerges as the real central character despite being little more than a stock extra for the first half of the book. That character, Philomena, turns out to be the only character with any depth of anyone who populates these pages – even Fludd, the possibly-supernatural being named after a long-dead alchemist and mystic, is barely revealed, with nothing on his motives or actual thoughts – and her decision between life in the convent (which was chosen for her by her deranged mother) and the fearful world outside of it is the only major event in the entire book. There’s an anti-Catholic undertone to the book, which may bother some readers, and a subplot around idolatry and statues that went right over my head.

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Next up: Hugh Laurie – yes, that one, House, Wooster, Jools, and so on – wrote a comic novel in 1996 called The Gun Seller. I have incredibly high expectations for this one.

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