→ July 21, 2010
→ By

March.

One of you tweeps sent along this Financial Times article on board games, which gives a nice overview of the current state of the industry for those of you wondering why I make such a fuss over these games.

I’ll be on ESPN Radio tonight at 5:40 pm EDT and again on the Herd at some point on Thursday, followed by a Klawchat around 1 pm EDT.

—

Geraldine Brooks won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with March, a work of derivative historical fiction that tells the story of the father (Mr. March) from Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Women, although he’s absent for the first half of that book and more of a background character in the second half. Brooks chose to follow March during his tour as a chaplain for the Union Army in the south, with flashbacks to his life in Concord before the period covered by Alcott’s work.

I am generally not a fan of parallel novels or continuations because of the difficulties in maintaining consistency with a character of someone else’s creation and the change in prose styles, although the latter wasn’t likely to bother me in this case since my only experience with Little Women was in one of those abridged Moby Books versions, which I read close to thirty years ago (along with most of the titles in that series). But the lack of continuity in March’s character was apparent because of the way Brooks infused him with some distinctly modern ideas and sensibilities, and I found Brooks’ depictions of other characters to be thin, such as the southern plantation owner whose racist views and animalistic treatment of his slaves, while probably well rooted in history, came straight out of central casting, and made March’s reactions to him trite as well.

Perhaps more infuriating is Brooks’ fabrication of a weird, pseudo-love triangle subplot where March has romantic feelings for a slave he met – in an extremely unlikely coincidence – twice across a period of nearly two decades on two separate journeys to the American south. The improbable nature of the romance is bad enough, making it seem as artificial as it is. But when March ends up in a Union hospital in Washington and his wife travels from Concord to see him – all of which occurs in Little Women – Brooks uses a miscommunication device better suited to a Wodehouse novel, and not for comedy, but to create a lasting crack in the foundation of the Marches’ marriage – one that doesn’t (to the best of my recollection, or my wife’s, since she read the unabridged original work) exist in Alcott’s novel.

So … why did it win the Pulitzer? I’ve read about 40% of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, including the ten winners prior to the most recent one (Tinkers, on my shelf now), and there seems to be a recent trend favoring books that dwell heavily on race or ethnic identity. You might argue that that subject is central to the American experience, so an award given to an American novel each year should rate those books highly. My personal view is that a book on race or racism can indeed be a compelling read, but not if the author crams the Big Obvious Idea (“Slavery … is bad!”) down the readers’ throats or wraps it up in stock characters who sit firmly on one side or the other of the question. Brooks’ characters lacked complexity in their moral worldviews, making the book seem inconsequential as a whole; the most believable character, in a strange way, was John Brown, one of a few historical figures to appear in the book (Thoreau and Emerson also have cameos), as Brown’s monomaniacal view on slavery and liberation was built on a nuanced rationalization of killing to save others from being killed. Brown only appears briefly – Brooks postulates that the Marches’ financial run came from supporting Brown’s endeavor – but his was, for me, the most interesting passage of the book.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s The Patron Saint of Liars. And yes, I’m several books – not to mention a game and a few songs – behind in my blogging.

Filed Under: Uncategorized 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: , , , ,
→ April 3, 2010
→ By

Tales of the South Pacific.

My 2010 Predictions post is up, including standings, playoffs, MVPhe/Cy winners, and a top 3 for each RoY award. There’s also a straggler post from Arizona on Fabio Martinez and two other Angel prospects, and I did a chat on Friday afternoon.

I’m scheduled to be on the Herd on Monday morning, but the weekly ESPNEWS hit is off next week.

—

James Michener won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his short story collection Tales of the South Pacific, later adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein into a Pulitzer- and Tony-award-winning musical, which later became a hit movie*. The stories in the collection are connected, so while there’s no single narrative through the series (aside from World War II itself, a fairly compelling plot even sixty-plus years later), characters appear in multiple stories and you couldn’t read them out of sequence without missing some history or the occasional inside reference. They’re interesting, often funny, frequently romantic (in the classical sense, not in the Harlequin sense), but nothing Michener wrote could compete with his concise recap of the assault on the (fictional) island of Kuralei and the brief story that follows it, as the narrator walks through the cemetery that holds the fallen from that battle.

*I actually had no idea that “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” was from South Pacific until I sat down to write this post. I figured it wasn’t originally from that hair-coloring commercial, but I couldn’t have even guessed what musical contained the track.

Some scattered thoughts from this book:

* This had to be an inspiration for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in multiple ways. I could imagine Heller writing his novel as a sarcastic, almost angry response to Michener’s somewhat antiseptic take on a brutal war – but at the same time, Michener mined subtle humor from incompetent officers, and the character Tony, who flies all over the Pacific trading one good for another in pursuit of liquor, seems like a precursor to Heller’s Milo.

* Tales of the South Pacific would never win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction today. The first 30-odd years of the award largely rewarded novels told stories highly illustrative of some aspect of the American experience. If you look at recent winners, particularly the last ten years, the emphasis has been on edgier fare – Oscar Wao, Middlesex, The Road, even the blacks-who-owned-slaves backdrop of The Known World – with the occasional exception for an old-school winner like Empire Falls (which handled several major and very modern themes) or Gilead (I imagine the gorgeous prose and raw emotion won out). Michener’s novel today is almost more like a smart beach read, enjoyable, set in a serious time, but not a novel for the ages.

* The mere title of this novel reminds me of the best musical that never existed, found in an episode of the TV series Amazing Stories called “Gershwin’s Trunk,” in which a songwriter with writer’s block uses a psychic to contact the ghost of George Gershwin, who provides him with (among others) a song called “I Discovered You,” leading with the couplet: “Balboa thought it was terrific/When he discovered the Pacific.” Twenty-five years I have had that song in the back of my brain. It’s a hell of an episode.

Next up: A book written by a reader! Richard Dansky’s first novel, the ghost story Firefly Rain, which is excellent through the first 100 pages.

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: , , ,
→ February 17, 2010
→ By

The Known World.

Edward Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World combines techniques or themes from some seriously great novels of the last fifty years, including Beloved, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a faux-historical writing style I’ve seen before but whose origin I can’t place. Unfortunately, it ended up less satisfying than the great novels it emulates, so while a solid novel in its own right, it suffers from the inevitable comparisons the reader will make while moving through the book.

The center of the book is the estate of the slaveowner Henry Townsend, a black man who became free around age 20 but who chose to purchase slaves for himself and build his fortune on the backs of members of his own race. Townsend dies at the beginning of the novel, although we see large chunks of his life through flashbacks, and the bulk of the plot revolves around the gradual decaying of the tight order of things – the business operations and the formal and informal hierarchies – of the tiny empire he’s built on that estate. The wide cast of characters includes slaves, freed blacks, and whites whose lives intersected with the Townsends, often with disastrous results.

While whites are largely depicted as forces of evil in the book, whether directly bringing evil on the black characters or simply by opening the door for ill fortunate, Jones targets black slaveowners and even highlights black slaves who exercised formal or informal authority over others for their moral culpability in the suffering of slaves. Using a black slaveowner and his family at the story’s center allows him to remove the facile white-bad-black-good dichotomy that could obscure the greater themes of morality he’s trying to explore, and the resulting moral ambiguity suffuses the novel, such as the question of whether a “fair” slaveowner is any better than a cruel one, or what the value of a law is when men charged with enforcing it fail to do so or even openly flout it. Jones mentions other outrages of the time like anti-miscegenation laws, but brushes past them because they’re not worth his time – his interest, beyond just telling a story, seems to lie in exploring situations that lack right or obvious answers, and thus he ignores those where modern sensibilities will lead all readers to the same horror or repulsion.

Where The Known World fell a little short for me was in narrative greed – it’s obvious from the start that the plantation will crumble without Henry Townsend, and it was evident to me early in the book that Caldonia, his widow, wasn’t up to the task of managing it, which presaged, at a high level, what was going to happen with the slaves and the estate. The interest of the plot, for me, was largely in finding out the fates of the various central characters, particularly the slaves, although Henry’s parents do figure into the last major plot strand, one that I thought had a strong symbolic significance and was the only area where Jones took square aim at whites, even non-slaveowners, for their role in the great cultural tragedy of slavery. And Jones remains true to life – some characters find positive, if not actually happy, endings, while others meet tragic ends and some just end up in the great grey middle.

The faux-historical trick I mentioned in the intro merits a mention. Jones intersperses fake historical facts, written in the dry manner of a history text or even a census register, throughout the book, whether to tell us the fate of a minor character or to give shape or color to a place or a county or a period of time. I found it very effective, and it gave the book the feel of a longer one because of its level of detail, without requiring the time an 800-page book demands.

Next up: Since finishing this, I read Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder, the last published Christie novel, a solid but unspectacular Miss Marple novel that, as always, had me second-guessing my instincts (which turned out to be right, although I can hardly take credit after doubting myself so heavily) after I thought I’d picked out the culprit. After finishing that this morning, I’ve started Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the year before Jones won with The Known World.

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→ 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.

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→ November 29, 2009
→ By

Alice Adams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ September 29, 2009
→ By

The Edge of Sadness.

Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, is a pensive, thoughtful character study, centered on a Catholic priest named Hugh Kennedy who, while recovered from a battle with alcoholism, still has a shade of emptiness in his professional and spiritual life, brought into focus by his reconnection with a family he has known since childhood, the Carmodys.

Charlie Carmody, the family patriarch, invites Father Kennedy to his 81st birthday party, making the priest a witness to his continued psychological tormenting of his children while also bringing him back into contact with Charlie’s son John, a priest in Kennedy’s old parish; and daughter Helen. O’Connor manages to flesh out those two characters – Charlie is basically a one-note curmudgeon, but responsible for a fair bit of black comedy – while using all of his secondary characters to help unfold Kennedy’s story and lead him to realize why he isn’t fulfilled in his current life.

It’s not an overtly theological or religious novel, although of necessity we get some internal monologues from Father Kennedy, including one on the difference between rote and thoughtful prayer:

The mechanical act of falling upon one’s knees and saying The Lord’s Prayer every day is one thing and a simple thing, but to say even the first half-dozen words of that prayer with the attention they deserve is quite another and not at all so simple. I think every prayer well said is a shot through a barricade…

Father Kennedy also breaks with the conventional fictional portrayals of priests as angry drunks, molesters, or insipid ciphers. He’s well-developed and reflective, with a sharp, almost sarcastic sense of humor:

“I mean, if you cut your hand off, it hurts; it doesn’t hurt any less simply because a thousand other people may have cut their hands off before you.”
“No, but if you remember all those other hands you may be prevented from hiring a hall and giving a short talk on ‘How I Cut My Hand Off.'”

Where the novel might fail to appeal is its almost complete lack of plot. There’s a long flashback to Father Kennedy’s battle with the bottle, including his time at a rehab facility in the Southwest (where he runs into one of those aforementioned stereotyped priests, perhaps O’Connor’s way of parodying other portrayals), and one major event at the end of the book (and if you don’t see it coming, you’re not paying attention), but the novel is introspective and dwells on its main character and narrator. I found him interesting because he was written realistically and because I found his soliloquies worth reading, but it can be slow and O’Connor’s writing did occasionally drift into wordiness.

Next up: A little light nonfiction – Kingsley Amis’s Everyday Drinking.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ September 18, 2009
→ By

Ironweed.

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

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

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

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

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

Next up: Richard Russo’s The Risk Pool.

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→ August 29, 2009
→ By

The Confessions of Nat Turner.

My Kazmir trade analysis was posted this morning.

William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1967 and is on the TIME 100, but its main claim to fame is the controversy that surrounded its publication, as African-American writers and scholars largely banded together to criticize the book’s fictionalized portrait of its title character. Turner led the only major slave rebellion in the U.S., killing 55 white men, women, and children before the rebellion fizzled out and he was captured, but very little is known of his life other than what we have in the 20-page document known as “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” the accuracy of which is in question because it represents Turner’s words as written by one of the white attorneys working on his case. The novel did little for me – the prose was bombastic and the story is so full of digressions, tangents, and internal monologues that Turner’s reasons for rebelling are beaten into the ground – but the controversy is worth a deeper look.

The edition I read was the 25th-anniversary reprint that includes a new afterword from Styron, who quotes his (African-American) friend and fellow author James Baldwin to argue that, had he himself been black, he would not have caught the same criticism. That is, his biggest crime was being a white author writing about an African-American icon, intruding into territory in which he did not belong. I’m sure there was some element of that in the backlash against Styron’s book (which included an influential book of essays called Ten Black Writers Respond), but Styron glosses over some of the least flattering elements of his portrayal.

Styron ties Turner’s desire for rebellion to three causes. One is religious fanaticism, which we know was a factor from the actual confessions; Turner was a preacher who believed his violent rebellion was a divine mission. Another was certain aspects of his life as a slave for both cruel and kind masters, which was fictionalized but is almost certainly a valid explanation. But the third is a deep sexual repression that manifests itself in disturbing ways from a sexual encounter with a teenaged boy to a fantasy of raping the woman who is perhaps the only white person in the book who treats Turner as something approximating a full human being. The portrayal, which as far as I can tell has no basis in reality, demeans Turner and diminishes his myth by removing any righteousness from his cause. Demonizing Turner would have been easy enough through more attention to the violence of his makeshift army’s rebellion, where revenge was taken on all whites, including young children. Adding this bizarre sexual-repression twist seems to tie into the view of white slaveowners, that blacks were more akin to animals than to whites.

The book is fiction, not a biography, and Styron emphasizes that point in his afterword in response to critics of the book’s inaccuracy. I have no particular issue with an author creating a backstory for an actual historical figure about whom so little is known. What bothered me was the creation of a backstory that delegitimizes the simple idea (or myth) that Turner rebelled against the system that enslaved him and over a million other blacks at the time of the rebellion. We can condemn the violence of the insurrection while still understanding and sympathizing with its causes.

Next up: I’m a little behind, having just finished Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees this morning. Let’s just say for now that I don’t agree with the Baltimore Sun critic who referred to Kidd as “a direct literary descendant of Carson McCullers.”

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