→ June 24, 2010
→ By

Farewell, My Lovely.

My first notes piece from the Tournament of Stars is up, along with a video of right-hander Christian Montgomery.

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

How can you not like Raymond Chandler? He was a serious, literary writer who chose the detective story as his milieu and even wrote one of the greatest essays ever on the art of writing (“The Simple Art of Murder”). His prose was sparse and forceful like Hammett’s, but with a constant undercurrent of wry, self-deprecating humor. And his influence has been enormous.

I think the critical consensus has The Big Sleep as his best novel, but for my money Farewell, My Lovely surpasses it, with a more involved plot, much more insight into the character of the detective, Philip Marlowe, and more dry humor. Marlowe stumbles on a giant man, Moose Malloy, who storms a black nightclub that was previously whites-only, and is more or less dragged upstairs where he sees Malloy slug the bartender and hears him shoot the owner. Shortly afterward, Marlowe gets a cold call from a potential client who wants him to provide protection for a brief job that night, and despite his own suspicion, goes along … and that’s where the fun really starts.

Chandler weaves the two cases in and out of each other as Marlowe chases one while the other might be chasing him, and while there’s a natural suspicion that the two tracks are related, the answer to that isn’t clear until the very end of the story. I thought we got more insight into Marlowe’s character in this book, from the way he uses the weakness of Jesse Florian to get more information from her to the way he manipulates her nosy neighbor to his handling of the liberated young Anne Riordan. There’s a con-man psychic, marijuana cigarettes, a kidnapping, lots of booze, and the usual spot-on prose from the master of the genre.

Next review: Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 11, 2010
→ By

Olive Kitteridge.

She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years. She understood that as he drove his car back down the coast toward Boston, toward his wife with whom he had raised three children, that something in him would be satisfied to have witnessed her the way he had tonight, and she understood that this form of comfort was true for many people, as it made Malcolm feel better to call Walter Dalton a pathetic fairy; but it was thin milk, this form of nourishment; it could not change that you had wanted o be a concert pianist and ended up a real estate lawyer, that you had married a woman and stayed married to her for thirty years, when she did not ever find you lovely in bed.

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge , winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is a novel of short stories, all connected by their setting and the presence of the title character, the crotchety, depressed, and often cruel retired schoolteacher whose role varies from episode to episode. In several stories, she sits at the center, sometimes with her long-suffering husband Henry, sometimes with her semi-estranged son Christopher (whose life appears to be the long process of recovery from having Olive as a mother), and at the end, in “River,” as the star.

Along the way we meet many other residents of the small town Crosby, Maine, the suicides and would-be suicides, the drunks, the faithless spouses, the grieving widow, the older couple looking for safety in each other, almost nobody happy and nearly everyone dealing in some way with depression. That makes for compelling reading, as Strout’s understanding not so much of the human psyche but of the why and how we become depressed is so deep that she can paint these characters with a delicate hand, but it also makes for a complete freaking downer of a book. It is great literature, with prose reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson’s, and Olive is a riveting and fully realized character, but she’s also unlikeable for her coldness and her refusal – or inability – to take responsibility for her actions and their effects on those around her.

The short story novel concept is a new one to me – whether this even qualifies as a novel is a matter of opinion, but the presence of Olive in every episode and the overarching story arc of this later period of life does tie everything together with a clear direction from start to finish – and reading it gave me the feeling of watching a season of a TV series, each episode self-contained, introducing a new cast around the central character. The downside is that we merely get glimpses into each side character, such as Angie, the alcoholic piano player whose role as the other woman is contributing to her malaise, or Julie, the overdramatic woman jilted on her wedding day by a fiance who wants to be with her but not to marry her, and whose conclusion is open-ended and unsatisfying. But I don’t think Strout’s goal was to satisfy but to, as the blurb on the back cover says (in a rare instance of one of such text proving accurate), “offer profound insights into the human condition.” And I’d say on that front, she succeeded. I just wouldn’t call her if I had a case of the blues.

Next up: Vacation, with at least nine books in tow, starting with Rex Stout’s Fer-de-Lance and Pierre Magnan’s Death in the Truffle Wood. And since this is a real vacation, involving planes and such, I’ll be offline all of next week, including, most blissfully of all, email.

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 3, 2007
→ By

Housekeeping.

Marilynne Robinson wrote exactly one novel during the period covered by the TIME 100, her 1980 book, Housekeeping, which made the list and won several awards for the best debut novel of its year. She wrote one novel shortly after the list’s publication, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and to date, that’s her entire output of fiction. I suppose that she’s another datum in the argument that less is more.

Housekeeping is a scant story and most of its prose takes place in the narrator’s head; there’s as little dialogue as you’ll see in any book this side of Robinson Crusoe, and there’s very little action in the plot, which sort of jumps along like a tired frog with no particular destination in mind. But its prose itself is brilliant, often beautiful, and manages to be both rich and sparse at the same time, with powerful images used to convey strong emotions, notably those of loneliness, fear, and destiny:

Edith found her boxcar and composed herself in it, while the trainmen went about the jamming and conjoining of cold metal parts. In such weather one steps on fossils. The snow is too slight to conceal the ribs and welts, the hollows and sockets of the earth, fixed in its last extreme. But in the mountains, the earth is most unceremoniously buried, with all its relics, against its next rising, in hillock and tumulus.

The story itself revolves around two sisters, Ruth (the narrator) and Lucille, who are orphaned as young children and then live with their maternal grandmother, then two eccentric great-aunts, then finally their mother’s sister, Sylvie, a lifelong transient who engages in various small tasks (such as hoarding empty tin cans and magazines) because that, in her mind, is how one keeps house. The book is almost completely devoid of male characters; their grandfather dies in the book’s first few pages, their father is completely absent, and only one man speaks any words at all, and those only briefly in the story’s last three chapters to bring the plot to its climax.

Ruth and Lucille both react differently to life with Sylvie in the rural town of Fingerbone; Lucille eventually craves stability and seeks it out in conformity, while Ruth (apparently taking after her mother as well as her aunt) is complacent to live a quiet, solitary, sad life without the trappings of society that might serve to pin her in one place. Lucille shouts at the dinner table one night, “I can’t wait until I’m old enough to leave this place! … I think I’ll go to Boston,” and when asked why Boston, she replies, “Because it isn’t Fingerbone, that’s why!” (The passage seems like it might have inspired Augustana’s song about the city I call home.) Yet in the end, it’s Sylvie and Ruth who leave Fingerbone first, and Lucille stays behind to pursue her unknown destiny.

It’s odd to find a novel with this kind of depth and thematic complexity despite having just three major characters, little dialogue, two settings, and almost no action until the book’s final stages. It’s a remarkable feat of language and of thought, and perhaps even more remarkable that I, an avowed plot-first reader, enjoyed and even appreciated the work.

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