DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS . . . AND OTHER SUMMER READING

Summertime . . . and the reading is easy—or at least easier than during the other seasons of the year. I had no particular goal or plan for summer reading when I got started in June, but looking back over the past three months, I see that I’ve taken a decent run at my fiction bookshelf in particular.

I began by devouring in pretty much one sitting Steve Martin’s novella Shopgirl—a wistful tale of loneliness and love: an odd but engaging little book. Then I read Don DeLillo’s novella Pafko at the Wall; it is actually the prologue to his novel Underworld, but it was published in a stand-alone edition in 2001, the 50th anniversary of “the shot heard round the world,” Bobby Thompson’s pennant-winning home run for the New York Giants against the Brooklyn Dodgers on October 3, 1951, which the narrative focuses on. I started with those two shorties because I wanted to establish some readerly momentum early in the summer.

Next up was Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men—as dark and as grim and as gripping as anything I’ve ever read (including Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, which I read a number of years ago and still have not recovered from). I’m not sure when I’ll be ready for the movie. . . . After that I stayed deep in the heart of Texas with Larry McMurtry’s Texasville, the sequel to The Last Picture Show, which I read in the summer of 2007. I had been surprised by how unsophisticated (in a narrative sense) The Last Picture Show is—Texasville is even less sophisticated (and much longer), and I have to admit that I almost gave up on McMurtry’s yarn-spinning a number of times . . . but then there would be some little plot twist or character quirk that kept me going. And I guess the ongoing midlife (mis)adventures of protagonist Duane Moore must have me sufficiently intrigued, as I’ve already picked up a copy of the next installment, Duane’s Depressed. (Apparently there’s a fourth installment too, but the reviews of it are so bad that I’ve promised myself that I’ll not go there.)

If, in a sense, McMurtry’s version of Texas helped to dilute the bleakness of McCarthy’s version, in which the human capacity for utter evil is truly palpable, then Richard Ford’s Independence Day (the sequel to The Sportswriter, which I read two years ago) helped to add some gravity to the male midlife wistfulness of Texasville. Like McMurtry’s novel, Independence Day focuses on a man in his late 40s trying to make sense of life as he knows it—and trying (not always successfully) to live a decent life: trying to be a decent parent and a decent ex-husband and a decent citizen within his community, and so on. . . . McMurtry’s vision is mostly comic—Ford’s is not. . . . Independence Day is long and slow-moving, but altogether compelling, and I already have on the shelf the next installment of the adventures of Ford’s Frank Bascombe—The Lay of the Land.

After those two doorstoppers, I needed something a bit shorter and a bit less dense, and Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher fit the bill: it is deftly plotted with engaging characters and a thematic center with something at stake (the way that “the religious right” would take over even our youth soccer fields). A very satisfying read: entertaining but also thought-provoking. Perrotta will be visiting UMass Boston on Sunday afternoon, November 16th to read from his work under the banner of the fourth annual Shaun O’Connell Lecture.

Speaking of UMass Boston, the next book I picked up was Inland, the fourth novel by old friend and now-retired UMB colleague K. C. (Chet) Frederick. Unlike his first three novels, which are all set in unnamed countries in eastern Europe, this one is set at a graduate school in the American Midwest in the late 1950s. The novel captures the early Cold War paranoia of its time and place: populated by interesting characters and punctuated by finely executed scenes, Inland is well worth reading.

As soon as I put down Inland, I picked up another book engaging with the Midwest in the 1950s: Bill Bryson’s often-hilarious memoir of growing up in Des Moines—The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. I plucked that book off the shelf in a summer house in Rhode Island where I was visiting for the weekend; I was enjoying it so much that when the weekend ended I was tempted to steal it (well, borrow it . . . ) from our absent hosts, but I opted to get it out of my local library instead and finish it off.

After a few good laughs compliments of Bryson, I guess I felt ready for more denseness and darkness as I then returned to Cormac McCarthy—this time to his mostly-south-of-the-border-down-Mexico-way novel All the Pretty Horses. What a terrific book! I think I would include it on my Top 10 list of all-time favorites. The personal quest undertaken on horseback by young John Grady Cole takes on a mythic edge that cut deep into my readerly marrow. And reading this novel helped to underscore for me the difference between a yarn-spinner like McMurtry and a true storyteller like McCarthy: the world of McMurtry’s Texasville is mostly a projected pseudo-Texas, at times really a caricature of Texas, whereas McCarthy’s Texas-Mexico border country feels altogether grounded in “the real world.” Coming soon to a bookshelf near me: the other two volumes of “the Border Trilogy.”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (as it were), I decided to expand my range and so picked up The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Junot Diaz. The hype surrounding this novel—specifically the fact that it took Diaz upwards of 10 years to write it—reminded me of the hype that accompanied the publication of Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim Two Boys a few years ago: put off by the hype, I was mildly skeptical about O’Neill’s novel . . . until I starting reading it. Ditto for my experience with Diaz’s novel: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is really an impressive piece of writing. In effect an exegesis of Dominican-American culture and society, the novel is both thematically and stylistically rich (much of the narrative as well as much of the dialogue is written in Spanglish); at times horrific in its depiction of “La Era de Trujillo” in the Dominican Republic, it is yet both humorous and poignant. In other words, it is very satisfying in every respect.

With August winding down, I concluded my summer reading with something completely different: Out Stealing Horses by Norwegian novelist Per Petterson. I have to admit that despite the critical acclaim this novel has received, I found it rather plodding and shapeless: not uninteresting . . . but hardly riveting. Still, I can’t complain, given the wealth of books that I did manage to work my way through from June through August.