→ May 31, 2010
→ By

Angels on Toast.

I’ve got a new first-round projection up on ESPN.com, and am headed to the studio shortly to appear on ESPNEWS at 2:40 pm EDT today.

—

After reading and loving Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born, I loaded up my swaptree want list with her other titles and ended up with at least four of them. Angels on Toast is the first I’ve read so far, and it has the same dry, sardonic style as Time, but unlike the likeable scoundrels at the heart of that novel, Angels‘ lead characters all seem to be rotten at their cores.

The main conceit of Angels on Toast is that everyone is on the make, whether for a business deal or a romantic liaison, and if you’re not looking to take someone or something you’ll end up getting taken. Lou and Jay are businessmen and friends who enjoy a drink and a run about town; Lou was happily married but has grown bored with his wife and her snobby relatives, while Jay makes no bones about having a long-term affair as a reprieve fro his battleaxe wife. The two end up covering for each other, using their shared interest in a crazy hotel get-rich-quick scheme as part of their stories to their wives, with both of their wives reacting differently to their husbands’ infidelities. Meanwhile, Lou’s paramour is herself stringing along another guy, and then adds another to the list, all while demanding that Lou divorce his wife and marry her – probably so she can get U.S. Citizenship. And Lou’s first wife – of whose existence his current wife is unaware – saunters back in the picture to soak Lou for a little pity money.

Powell mined humor more from her observational prose than from comic situations, such as this chapter opening on Lou’s wife, the mousy Mary, when she begins to realize that her husband is cheating on her:

Lately Mary ahd thought more and more about going to a psychoanalyst. Something was going queer in her mind, but the trouble was she was not having hallucinations, she was having facts. What could the doctors do about that? Well, doctor, she would say if she went to one of Them – (she always thought of the psychoanalysts as Them) I was perfectly normal for the first twenty-nine years of my life, I lived on a normal diet of hallucinations; an unusally intelligent and cultured upbringing enabled me to conduct my life decently blindfolded, but lately my mind seems to be shaking. Doctor, I think I’m going sane. Then the doctor, of course, would say, Nonsense, Mrs. Donovan, you can’t tell me that an intelligent woman like you is beginning to doubt your insanity. Why, Mrs. Donovan, he would say, smiling indulgently, I assure you on my word of honor as a medical man you are as insane as anybody in this room.

One of Powell’s specialties was the character who came to the big city – usually New York – and whipped up a life for himself through a combination of his wits, half-truths, and fabrications, but those characters live more on the fringes of this novel, like the hustler T.V. Truesdale, who disappears for several chapters after a strong introduction that depicts him as an opportunist of the highest order, with the camera lens focusing instead on Lou’s jumbled personal life. It makes for an amusing novel that could have been something more, funnier or deeper, had the camera panned back to show more of the picture. A Time to Be Born had that depth, along with the ingenue-heroine to grab the reader’s empathy.

Next up: Walter Moers’ Rumo: And His Miraculous Adventures.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 9, 2010
→ By

Young Lonigan.

Blogging here will be light for probably the next month as I work overtime on draft content.

WGBH is auctioning off a “Scout with Keith Law” package, where the winner gets to tag along with me to a game somewhere in New England this summer, either a minor league contest or one on the Cape. We did this last year and ended up with two winners, raising over $1800 for the local public television station, which is also a major producer of quality children’s programming. I’m happy to be able to support them with my time.

—

James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan, the first book of the Studs Lonigan trilogy (#29 on the Modern Library 100), is a gritty, unflinching portrayal of urban life in the 1910s as viewed through the eyes of the city’s teenagers, complete with prejudice, petty theft, casual sex (more discussed than enacted), and worship of violence. Farrell’s emphasis on depicting the city of his youth does come at the expense of a coherent storyline, although that seems to be coming in the two subsequent books.

“Studs” Lonigan is a teenager just out of a Catholic middle school who straddles the line between wannabe and tough, striking poses, getting into street fights (and winning them), grappling with romantic feelings that to him undermine his toughness, and aspiring to gradually greater depths of antisocial behavior. He admires fighters and gangsters and flouts his parents’ authority not as much for a desire for freedom as out of a need to play the part – the older kids he seeks to emulate do the same, so he reenacts the same conversations at home, yet over more trivial matters and with less dramatic results.

Young Lonigan doesn’t have a clear linear plot or a compelling quest for its title character, and Farrell seems as happy to set the scene as he does to create some action:

About the street there seemed to be a supervening beauty of reflected life. The dust, the scraps of paper, the piled-up store windows, the first electric lights sizzling into brightness. Sammie Schmaltz, the paper man, yelling his final box-score editions, a boy’s broken hoop left forgotten against the elevated girder, the people hurrying out of the elevated station and others walking lazily about, all bespoke the life of a community, the tang and sorrow and joy of a people that lived, worked, suffered, procreated, aspired, filled out their little days, and died.

The book was controversial when first published because of its depiction of casual sex among teenagers, including the girl, Iris, who favors many of the boys with “gang shags,” but those passages – tame and almost self-censored by today’s standards – serve to highlight the disaffection of its central characters. Farrell saves his minimal action-oriented writing for a couple of fight scenes, including one where Studs Lonigan thinks he’s making his bones but finds the resulting increase in street cred only slightly and temporarily satisfying.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 23, 2010
→ By

Mohawk.

We’re having major work done on our house, so we’re living out of a nearby hotel this week (frequent-guest and -flyer points are one of the few compensations for a high-travel job), which has cut down on blogging time, which is a long way of saying I’m sorry for the long gap between posts. I did chat yesterday on ESPN.com, and my top 100 ranking for the upcoming draft is already with my editors, so I’m hopeful we’ll see that on the site later today.

—

Richard Russo’s first novel, Mohawk, has most of the elements that made his next four novels (The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, and Empire Falls) so good, but in many ways it’s obvious that it’s his rookie effort, since the well-drawn characters are existing rather than traveling through a coherent plot, and the humor isn’t as easy as it is in his later books.

There’s no single central character in Mohawk, although the ex-spouses Dallas and Anne and their son Randall are fairly close to the center of the book, involved in much of what goes on even though Dallas is more actor than active emotional participant. Anne has to be one of Russo’s best female characters, a middle-aged woman who is still paying for a mistake of teenaged rebellion while pining for a man she knows she can never have and feuding with her mother, a passive-aggressive shrew who would drive the Dalai Lama to drink. Russo fills Mohawk with many of the usual cast of blue-collar characters, including the greasy-spoon owner, the bookie, and the dirty cop, each of whom finds himself woved into one of the various plot strands when he’s not there for comic relief.

While it’s a fun and quick read, like the other four Russo novels, Mohawk doesn’t offer the strong, compelling story of those books, as it’s more a slice of life in a dying northeastern industrial town with the sort of folks Russo has since shown he loves to create. It’s worth reading for Russo fans, especially because it’s a look at a great writer in a formative period, but I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting point to readers just starting out with his work.

Next up: Still slogging through Junichiro Tanazaki’s The Makioka Sisters, kind of a dense, slow period piece. Best part so far is the footnote defining the word “sushi.”

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 10, 2010
→ By

Firefly Rain.

Richard Dansky has been a reader of mine since not long after I joined ESPN and started the dish, even interviewing me about two years ago on his own web site. He’s one of the premier writers for videogames, writing for Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy Splinter Cell games while also dabbling in horror and fantasy; you can read more about his work on his official site. In addition to a shared love of baseball, Richard and I have a reasonable overlap in our reading interests, including hard-boiled detective novels, so he sent me a copy of his first novel, recently out in paperback, Firefly Rain.

The novel centers on Jacob Logan, the prodigal son of North Carolina parents who returns home after their deaths to deal with the mundane details around the family house, now his, in the tiny town of Maryfield. The community is populated with your standard assortment of local characters, although Dansky keeps their number manageable and all are well drawn, especially Carl, the cantankerous neighbor who’s been keeping an eye on the house for Jacob for several years, and Reverend Trotter, the laid-back clergyman who dispenses common-sense advice without florid phrasing or excessive sermonizing.

Not long after Jacob arrives, however, weird things begin happening – his car disappears, items move around the house on their own, windows won’t close until they’re damn good and ready, and the phenomenon of fireflies refusing to fly on to the Logan property. When the weirdness escalates to a blackout, an attack by an insane dog, and worse, Jacob summons help in the form of a friend from Boston to try and help him piece together whether this is a series of crimes or a full-on haunting.

Richard described the novel to me up front as a ghost story, but I think that undersells the book. A ghost story, to me, revolves around the ghosts – you read to be scared or spooked or maybe even freaked – whereas Firefly Rain has a good story that may or may not involve ghosts. I’d compare it to Agatha Christie’s novels – yes, her Poirot and Miss Marple books were mysteries, but they’re compelling stories that you can read and enjoy on their own merits without trying to solve the puzzle (which is good, since I never get those right anyway). And Richard’s book does have an element of mystery to it, with a few clues left lying around if you care to try to decipher it, although I preferred in this case to let the story carry me along.

The best aspect of the novel is that Jacob makes few bad choices – the way he loses his cell phone might be the only one you could call “truly dumb” – and as the narrator Jacob dissects his own thinking, you can buy into some of his questionable moves, rather than seeing them as plot conveniences to keep the story moving. Even the lost cell phone ended up of marginal importance at best. I did find some of the folksier dialogue a little dissonant, but I’ve spent no time in rural North or South Carolina and can’t credibly discuss its authenticity or lack thereof. I also thought the cover text didn’t sell the book that well – it concentrates on the ghost aspect instead of the story aspect, which explores a pretty basic theme about the responsibilities of a child to his parents, both in life and after their deaths. I’ll cheerfully admit to bias here, as I’ve always enjoyed chatting with Richard, but I wouldn’t recommend a book I didn’t like just because I knew the author (in fact, I’d just pretend I’d never read it), and Firefly Rain is worth your time.

Next up: I’ve finished Michael Davis’ marvelous Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street and am now working through an early collection of Dame Christie’s stories, published under the title Poirot Investigates, after which I’ve got Richard Russo’s Mohawk lined up.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 24, 2010
→ By

In a Perfect World.

Laura Kasischke’s In a Perfect World soft, ethereal prose with a distinctly dystopian vision hauntingly grounded in current reality to tell a story about grace and maternal love in difficult, unexpected circumstances. It’s a little like The Road as written by the female version of Richard Russo.

The protagonist, Jiselle Dorn, is a flight attendant who has just married a handsome pilot and widowed father of three named Mark and moved into his house with his three kids just as a virulent illness known as “the Phoenix flu” is starting to spread, killing, on page 9, Britney Spears, as well as a few other celebrities. Rather than drop us into a post-apocalyptic world as McCarthy did, Kasischke focuses on minutiae, with the relationship between Jiselle and two of Mark’s three kids – her immediate bond with his youngest child, Sam, and the animosity she faces from middle child Sara – at the center of the novel’s first half. The flu’s spread accelerates and society begins to slowly crack around the family, while Mark ends up stuck out of the country, leaving Jiselle to run his house and family and cope with large and small issues simultaneously while evaluating the choices she’s made, the factors in her life that made her make those very choices, and the evolving situation around her.

The novel ends almost mid-sentence, without clear resolutions to macro plot questions like how far and wide the epidemic spreads. The resolution resides in tiny gestures and words and little symbols of hope and grace, and I had to re-read the last few pages to grasp where Kasischke wanted to leave us while shaking off my innate desire for some sort of clear conclusion to the Phoenix flu storyline, which was, after all, just background. It’s a bold way to end a novel, risky for anyone looking for a mass-market audience that likes its chapters short, its villains villainous, and its endings neat. But because Kasischke crafted the Jiselle character so well, I empathized with her to the point that, after the second read, I got the ending by standing in the character’s place.

The one flaw in the novel mirrored Russo’s work as well. Russo has never been great at crafting female characters, and nearly all of the men in In a Perfect World are two-dimensional or worse. Mark in particular is more plot device than character, and I found it very hard to understand some of his actions toward Jiselle and his children. Outside of Mark’s son, Sam, the rest of the men seemed like props, and a potential plot thread involving neighbor Paul Temple went nowhere.

In a Perfect World was published in 2009 and I assume it was written in 2008, before the H1N1 threat emerged, making her choice to build the book around a scary communicable disease a little prescient. Beyond that, however, Kasischke touches on issues like climate change, energy costs, and distrust of government, dropping accent colors in the background rather than giving us long-winded sermons by central characters. It’s a thoughtful, compelling read if you appreciate books driven by small events and emotions rather than major turning points, and the gradual decline in the world inside the book provides more than enough narrative greed to get you to the end.

Next up: As promised, Aldous Huxley’s Island. I received both books gratis from the publisher.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 1, 2010
→ By

Straight Man.

I’ll be on Mike & Mike on Wednesday morning at 9:40 am EST, and on ESPN Radio’s Baseball Tonight that evening in the 7 pm hour. Chats are completely up in the air until the end of spring training due to conflicts with games.

—

I don’t dislike Gracie. At least I don’t dislike her when I think about her. When I’m in one place and she’s in another. It’s when she’s near enough to backhand that backhanding her always seems like a good idea.

Hank Devereaux, the narrator and title character of Richard Russo’s brilliant
Straight Man, is a serious man wholly incapable of being serious, even when the situation calls for it. A tenured professor at a small public university in west-central Pennsylvania, Devereaux holds the temporary chairmanship of the English department (a job he doesn’t really want), believes that his brightest students “have concluded that what’s most important in all educational settings is to avoid the ridicule of the less gifted,” finds himself at the center of various family crises, and desperately needs to take a good, long piss*.

*Indeed, if talk of urination or male genitalia offends you, this may not be the book for you. I also wouldn’t recommend reading this if you’re drunk and trying not to break the seal.

Russo fills Straight Man with his standard menagerie of irresponsible men, generally responsible if somewhat inscrutable women, and small-town characters, but he aims his satirical instincts squarely at liberal-arts universities and their fatuous faculty members, including a couple of grade-A wackos in Devereaux’s department. The school is under pressure from the legislature to cut costs, an annual event, but this year a persistent rumor of a mass firing in the English department has everyone edge, with even tenured professors concerned they’re about to be let go and all members convinced that Devereaux has acceded to the demands of higher-ups by drawing up a proposed list of instructors to be cut – a fear he does nothing to dispel even though the legend is false. And he manages to escalate the issue by threatening on live (and very local) television to murder a goose if he doesn’t get a budget figure from the state by the following Monday, a spontaneous (if inspired) move that, of course, has unintended consequences.

While not quite as nuanced as his prior two novels, Straight Man is the funniest of the four Russo books I’ve read. Devereaux is sarcastic, but complex, carrying the burdens of an upbringing by two parents incapable of showing much love (one of whom, his father, eventually skipped out for an affair with a graduate student) and a daughter incapable of making responsible decisions (the one truly irresponsible woman in the book) as well as the weight of a career that went neither as far nor as well as he’d hoped. Devereaux published one book twenty years earlier and it turned out to be the only book he had in him. While that doesn’t make him a failure, it hasn’t given him the confidence of a history of success to drive him forward in his academic career or make him recognize the unusual stability of his home life. It probably has, however, prevented him from growing out of his sardonic (dare I say “snarky?”) personality, which is all the better for the reader.

The one hitch in Straight Man, a minor one at that, is the lack of a really strong female character. Hank’s wife, Lily, is a little too perfect, and spends much of the book away on a job interview, giving Hank a chance to really get himself into trouble. Hank’s secretary, Rachel, appears in every Russo book in some form – the sweet, somewhat attractive, meek woman with horrible taste in men – and his mother, an aloof, haughty woman largely devoid of maternal affectins, feels a little recycled as well. None of this detracted from the book’s humor or Russo’s compassion for his central male characters one iota. I enjoyed Straight Man on multiple levels and I’d recommend it to just about everyone.

You can also see my previous reviews of three other Russo novels – Empire Falls, Nobody’s Fool, and The Risk Pool – all of which were excellent.

Next up: Toni Morrison’s Jazz.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 27, 2010
→ By

Middlesex.

My draft blog entry on Jameson Taillon is up, as is a new post with scouting reports on Rice players Anthony Rendon & Rick Hague as well as thoughts on James Paxton’s decision to withdraw from Kentucky.
—

There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex is obsessed with the nature of our genes, or how our genes determine our nature, and understandably so, as a rare genetic mutation has left the narrator, née Calliope Stephanides, a “hermaphrodite,” or more accurately a boy born with underformed genitalia so that the doctor who gives birth to him and his parents mistake him for a girl and raise him as one until he’s fourteen. At that age, a car accident leads to the discovery of his true biological nature, a trip to a noted specialist who seems more interested in his papers than his patients, and Calliope’s decision to live out his life as the male Cal.

The novel spends more time on the history of Cal’s family and the path of the one renegade gene that affects his life, only spending the last third or so on Cal’s story. It begins in Turkey, where his Greek grandparents – who happen to be third cousins, as well as siblings – marry during their flight from the sacking of Smyrna and start a new life in Detroit amid a population of cousins and fellow Greek immigrants and a backdrop of Detroit’s brief boom and gradual decline after World War II. This family history was, to me, predictable, uninteresting, and rife with cliched characters. Cal’s cousin, Father Mike, is the worst of the lot, right down to his final act in the book; the only thing more cliched would have been if he’d molested a kid, but even without that, obvious author is obvious. The author’s antipathy toward religion made it clear that Father Mike was, and would be, one of the bad guys.

Where the book picked up in interest was when an ER doctor in Michigan discovers, if you’ll excuse the indelicacy, what exactly is between Calliope’s legs. The rapid-fire chain reaction that comes next, even with a hackneyed plot twist or two, opens up a world of questions and ambiguities that get at the heart of what the book is (or should be) about. Eugenides/Cal reject biological explanations for our nature and character, but at the same time reject the nurture argument (Cal is, after all, raised as a girl, but at fourteen decides to be a boy). In a more spiritually-minded book, I might argue this was the author’s defense of dualism, but here, I think Eugenides was really arguing for free will. We are not fully determined by our genes, our circumstances, or our upbringing, although all three are factors that contribute to our ultimate identities. We decide who we are, and we can even flout the rules laid down by our genes or our environment. Until Eugenides gets around to focusing on Calliope/Cal, however, the book drags with neither narrative greed nor clear point; I put the book down after one trip and read just twenty pages over four days before finishing it on my next flight.

I was also put off somewhat by Eugenides’ disdain for so many of his characters, even the “good” ones, other than Calliope/Cal, who is by her nature uncomfortable with himself even after his choice to live as a male. Desdemona, the traditional grandmother, is an eccentric, neurotic kook with her half-pagan spirituality and practiced martyr act. Milton, her son, is an angry, skeptical son who supposedly loves his kids but certainly shows little affection for them until Calliope disappears after her diagnosis – and it’s probably not a coincidence that at that point her older brother is also incommunicado, meaning that he chased the second AWOL child, probably because she was cushioning him from the blow of the first.

I can understand, to some degree, why the Pulitzer committee would choose Middlesex for the highest honor in American fiction. There’s certainly a modern, edgy angle to using an intersex person as the narrator and central character of a book. The biological motif is novel, and the question of nature versus nurture is ever more relevant as we hear headlines about how love, religion, altruism, and other feelings are nothing more than chemical interactions in the brain or reactions predetermined by our genes. There are two ways to read any novel: A straight read – I’d call it “superficial” but the term is too derogatory – where the reader focuses on plot and prose, and an academic read where the reader looks for meaning, metaphor, and symbolism. Middlesex is a better book in the latter vein, as it’s thought-provoking and intelligent, covering ground I haven’t seen before in a mainstream novel. Unfortunately, Eugenides’ ham-handed character development and the long buildup to the most interesting plot strand in the book made it a mediocre read for anyone who reads just for the pleasure of compelling characters or a gripping plot.

Next up: I’m almost finished with Richard Russo’s Straight Man, after which I’ll start Toni Morrison’s Jazz.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 10, 2010
→ By

Gilead.

Marilynne Robinson’s debut novel, Housekeeping, came out in 1980, won several major awards (including the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best debut novel of the year), eventually landed on TIME‘s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005, and represented Robinson’s only published work of fiction for 25 years until she finally brought out her second novel, Gilead. And all that that novel ever did was win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is as if the literary world was saying:

Dear Ms. Robinson:

It is the opinion of our community that you should write more books.

Sincerely,

All of us

Robinson’s strength, at least based on these two novels, isn’t so much her storycraft as her prose, which is just remarkable, unlike any contemporary author I’ve ever read, word-perfect and genuine and lyrical and any other florid term used to describe brilliant writing. She nails every task laid before the writer of a novel of emotions, as both of her books are, from descriptive passages to the idiom of language and even internal monologues, like this one, where the narrator, Reverend John Ames, stops to reflect on the way he’s writing this book, which is a letter to his young son in the form of a memoir:

In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word “just.” I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened, and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed – when it’s used that way it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of the voice. … There is something real signified by that word “just” that proper language won’t acknowledge. It’s a little like the German ge-. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.

Reverend Ames is 76 years old at the book’s outset and is dying, slowly, of a heart condition, but at the same time is the father of a seven-year-old boy thanks to a second chance at love and marriage that found him marrying a woman many years his junior who happened to wander into his church one day, an event that turned out to be love at first sight. He knows that he’s dying and wants to leave a long letter to that son so that when the child is older he has something more to remember his father by than vague memories from childhood of a feeble old man who struggled to go up the stairs to his study. Reverend Ames walks back through the stories of his father and grandfather, both preachers but of wildly different sorts and temperaments, only to have to shift gears slightly when the son of his best friend, John Ames Boughton, drifts back into town after a long absence. The younger John Ames, named for the Reverend, has been a lifelong disappointment to his own father, another preacher, and to Reverend Ames, and to many others in the small (fictional) town of Gilead, Iowa. (Gilead is, itself, a place mentioned in Genesis, and the name apparently translates to “hill of testimony,” so I presume Robinson chose it as this novel is entirely the Reverend Ames’ testimony, not just of his faith but of his life.) Boughton’s purpose in the town isn’t clear, and he makes repeated attempts to talk to Reverend Ames – generally antagonizing him – before his purpose becomes clear shortly before the end of the book. Along the way, Reverend Ames presents his thoughts on all sorts of matters theological and mundane, interspersed with personal recollections from his own life and heartfelt passages about his wife and son:

I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.

I tell my daughter every day, multiple times a day, how much I love her, how much it has meant to me to have her in my life, how she is the center of my universe. Anything I have ever said to her in that vein has seemed wholly inadequate. I know exactly how Reverend Ames felt when he said those words.

Robinson didn’t wait 25 years for a follow-up, publishing Home, the story of John Ames Boughton, in 2008.

Next up: I must be out of my mind, but I’m going to try to tackle James Joyce’s Ulysses. I just can’t stand seeing it on five of my “greatest” booklists without a check mark next to it, or at least the knowledge that I gave it a legitimate effort.

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

Run.

My analysis of the Halladay/Lee series of deals is up on ESPN.com. I’ll be on Sirius 210/XM 175 at 8:35 pm EST tonight.

—

Ann Patchett’s Run, the long-awaited followup to her masterpiece, Bel Canto, is, like its predecessor, a beautifully written and sensitive book, one that moves quickly despite its slow treatment of time, with most of the book’s action occurring in a 24-hour period. Unfortunately, it’s also lightweight and sentimental as Patchett overplays her political theme at the expense of any conflict in the story itself.

Run covers the Doyle family, comprising the father Bernard, an Irish-American former mayor of Boston; his two adopted African-American sons, Teddy and Tip; the unseen older biological son, Sullivan; and, for the opening chapter, the mother, Bernadette, who is dead when the story opens. Bernard, Teddy, and Tip are attending a lecture given by Jesse Jackson at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on a snowy Boston evening, after which a traffic accident turns their insular world upside down when one of them is hurt and a bystander is critically injured.

Where Bel Canto had complex three-dimensional characters, Run has simple, entirely sympathetic ones. Tip, Teddy, and the young African-American girl Kenya who witnesses the accident are all thinly drawn; they are all runners (how stereotypical) and Tip and Teddy are each monomaniacal in their personal interests. Sullivan eventually appears, and his backstory is typical and excuses just about everything in his itinerant lifestyle, even the reason why he had to flee Africa to return to Boston unannounced. The closest we get to a complex character is Tennessee Moser, the woman injured in the traffic accident, whose conversation with her dead friend – Patchett wisely leaves the question of whether this is a religious experience, a dream, or a hallucination up to the reader – was, for me, the only truly compelling passage in the book, like a brilliant short story around which Patchett built a novel.

Patchett herself says in a Q&A at the end of the paperback edition that the story is primarily about politics, not family, and in a second note she fawns a little over the then-candidate Barack Obama. Kenya is the blatantly obvious Obama symbol, from her name to her sudden appearance on the scene to the way the plot unfolds where she is the person the Doyle family has been waiting for since the death of the mother (John Kennedy, perhaps?) almost twenty years earlier to the way she spurs Tip and Teddy to greater personal heights and even helps Sullivan straighten himself out … it’s too much, another example of the completely unrealistic expectations heaped on President Obama, who could turn out to be our greatest President ever and still fall short of the hyperbole. It’s ham-handed and a little condescending, and Patchett seems to have worked so hard to craft and protect this savior-character Kenya that she left virtually no conflict in the book – there is no unsympathetic character, no one working against the protagonists, little question of where we’re ultimately going. She offers one plot twist, but it turns out to have little effect on the plot, just some symbolic value that I won’t mention here for fear of spoiling it. I’m fine with books that are full of metaphor and symbolism, but give me plot and depth, too. The result here is a quick read and a warm one, but it’s a little maudlin and lacked the richness of the soaring epic of Bel Canto.

Next up: An “entertainment” from Graham Greene, one of his later spy novels, The Human Factor.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 13, 2009
→ By

A Time to Be Born.

Dawn Powell was a commercial failure as a novelist during her lifetime, despite accolades from her peers, including Ernest Hemingway, who called her his favorite living novelist. In fact, according to the Library of America,

At Dawn Powell’s death in 1965, nearly all of her books were out of print. Surveys of American literature failed to mention her. Among well-known critics, only Powell’s friend Edmund Wilson had ever published a lengthy and serious review of her work.

Powell died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave in New York’s Potter’s Field after a life riddled with depression, disappointment, and alcoholism. Yet her books have been on a modest thirty-year winning streak, one that the LOA credits Gore Vidal with starting in 1981.

I first heard of Dawn Powell in the introduction to Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, a book that was successful at its printing but fell out of print more than once after the author’s death. Terry Teachout compared Dundy’s legacy of mild obscurity to Powell’s, citing Powell as similar in style as well. Powell has no acknowledged magnum opus but A Time to Be Born seems to be among the critics’ favorites from her bibliography, and it did not disappoint, as it is a funny, bitter, snarky farce.

Powell chose to build the novel around a real-life power couple of the late 1930s, the Luces, Henry (founder of TIME magazine) and his wife Clare Boothe, who receives an unflattering portrayal in the scheming, selfish Amanda Keeler, who uses her feminine wiles and ability to manipulate others to overcome her humble, unhappy childhood and tear the publisher Julian Evans away from his happy marriage, launching her social career and, simultaneously, her career as a writer and pundit. Amanda’s carefully scripted life is upset, just slightly, when a childhood friend, Vicky Haven, comes to New York and receives a token job in the Evans’ publishing empire, only to find herself used by Amanda to cover up an affair while she unwittingly falls in love with her patron’s paramour.

Vicky is the sympathetic protagonist and is well-rounded, maturing as the book goes on from meek, self-effacing wallflower to determined if clumsy adult, but Amanda is the star of the show, a Becky Sharp of interwar America, batting eyelashes and working rooms, looking down on those who, if they knew her origins, would look down on her, and dominating a husband who is just as dominant on his own turf – the workplace. Amanda’s singleminded pursuit of power and the proxy for happiness it represents is understandable given her upbringing, and Powell shows us enough of this to evoke empathy in the reader until Amanda and Vicky come into inevitable conflict.

Powell’s wit is sharp, with descriptions built on backhanded compliments or outright putdowns, but even her descriptions of ordinary events show a facility with words that amuses for the length of the book:

…Ethel said, attacking her dainty squab with a savagery that might indicate the bird had pulled a knife on her first.

Where Powell shines beyond just raw wit and vitriol is her ability to see through characters and personalities right to the bone, as in her portrayal of the man who broke Vicky’s heart and sent her from her small Ohio town to New York, the shiftless Tom turner, who tries to compensate for his lack of worldliness at a dinner party with Vicky by arguing with everyone in sight:

“You’re quite wrong there, old man,” he stated disagreeably at every remark made by the other two men. He was one of those men who betray their secret frustration in this way: taken into a handsmoe mansion they fall silent, coming slowly to an indignant mental boiling point of “This should be mine!” until out of a clear sky they start to shower insults on the innocent host. Married to a plain wife they take it as a personal grievance when they meet a single beauty, and cannot forbear pecking at the beauty with criticisms of her left thumb, her necklace, her accent, as if destruction by bits will ease the outrage of not being able to have her. Unemployed, they jeer at the stupidity of an envied friend working so hard for so little pay. In the unexpected presence of an admited or celebrated person they are reminded gallingly of their own inferior qualities and humiliate themselves by inadequate sarcasm, showing clearly how impressed they are and how irrevocably inferior they know themselves to be.

A Time to Be Born is driven forward by the question of whether Amanda will get away with her schemes or whether she’ll get what’s coming to her, as well as whether the ingenue Vicky can find at least romantic happiness if not something more in the cold city. Powell’s male characters aren’t as strong or as well-built as her women outside of Amanda’s side dish Ken Saunders, and Julian Evans could have used more depth even if he was to remain an often spineless husband beneath his manipulative wife’s thumb, although his simmering revolt provides another subplot for the increasingly complex second half of the book.

Apropos of nothing, I did get a reward for slogging through Alice Adams a few weeks ago when I came across this allusion to one of the most enduring scenes in that drab book, where Alice, at a dance sans gentleman, sits in a pair of chairs on the veranda and pretends that her beau will be back at any moment:

Her agonized Alice Adams efforts to act as if she were reserving the other seat for a most distinguished but delayed escort, spoiled that evening too for her.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s long-delayed follow-up to her amazing Bel Canto, 2007’s Run.

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