BOOK REPORT . . .

So . . . a new semester has begun.

That new beginning seems like a good vantage point to look back at some reading I’ve done over the past 8 months. I must admit that it looks like a pretty random gathering of authors and titles . . . but maybe there was some sort of method to my madness . . .

Well, the first title that I tackled in 2011 was a Christmas gift—The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter. It was an engaging narrative about a guy going through a pre-midlife crisis. There was something Nick Hornby-esque about the book—and I think Hornby may even have written a blurb for the cover. I like Hornby. I liked Walter. A good way to start the year.
And then, because I was going to San Francisco (for the first time ever) in late January, I figured I should read something iconically associated with that wonderful city. I chose Dashiell Hammett’s classic crime novel The Maltese Falcon. I think I read it long ago, and I had certainly seen the movie. Anyway, it provided a good dose of local color and local flavor, and I enjoyed it enough that I decided to read another Hammett offering right away (this one set in New York)—The Thin Man.

Then it was on to one of my favorite books of the year—Steve Martin’s latest work of fiction, An Object of Beauty. With interpolated images of paintings, the book itself—which is about the contemporary art scene in New York—is “an object of beauty”: I thoroughly enjoyed and admired this book, for both its conception and its execution.

Next stop was one of the most heralded books of last year: Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists. A collection of linked stories centered around an English-language newspaper office in Rome, it certainly proved worthy (despite some unevenness) of the attention it received for its innovative concept. After that, perhaps prompted by my earlier reading of Jess Walter’s book, I took a run at Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked, which was published a few years ago. I’ve read and enjoyed most of Hornby’s novels, but this one seemed a little bit “thinner” than some of his previous works.

Then it was back to crime/detective fiction with Raymond Chandler’s Playback (one of his lesser-known titles, I think) and his classic The Big Sleep. Those were sandwiched around a totally different kind of book, A Seventh Man, a collaboration between British novelist and art critic John Berger and Swiss photographer Jean Mohr; I read this relative to a scholarly project I’m immersed in—it was interesting conceptually, but not really riveting reading.

Next up: Roddy Doyle’s Bullfighting, a collection of stories focused on Dublin men experiencing midlife crises. Very compelling reading—quite poignant at times. (I really should write a real review of this book. Hmmm.)

And then I read two very different memoirs. The first was Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up, which relates the launch of his wildly successful career (remember . . . he was “a wild and crazy guy”!) as a standup comic. But there is a depth to his story involving Martin’s complex relationship with his father: I was impressed by how he explored that dimension of his life. The second memoir was Paul Quarrington’s Cigar Box Banjo. I think I happened upon this title when I noted somewhere that Roddy Doyle had written the Foreword. A well-known Canadian novelist, Quarrington died of lung cancer a year or so ago: this musing on his life of books and music is ultimately an unsentimental account of his last months.

After the at-times heavy lifting of that book, I picked up Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Who knows how long that novel has been sitting on my bookshelf? It was one of my favorites of the year: a fully realized coming-of-age novel with all sorts of narrative and thematic twists and turns. I wish I could remember how or why I then decided to read Thomas McGuane’s Keep the Change: maybe because it had horses in it? I suppose I would describe it as a latter-day “western”—a “literary” piece of fiction exploring age-old themes involving land ownership. A good read if you like that sort of subject matter.

And finally, just as summer came to end, so did my reading of After Lyletown by old friend and former colleague K. C. (Chet) Frederick. Dramatizing how an individual’s past can have a way of catching up him or her, this very satisfying novel asks (and in its own way answers) the question of what price we have to pay for the indiscretions—even if fueled by idealism—of our youth.

BOOKIN' IT . . .

The Fall semester was busy, with a lot of heavy re-reading for my graduate seminar on the Modern Irish Novel: Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, John McGahern’s Amongst Women, Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal, Frances Molloy’s No Mate for the Magpie, and Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper. Still, I managed to read a few other books “on the side,” and now that a new semester is looming I feel the urge to “re-view” a few of those even while looking forward to what lies ahead.

At this point I’m not even sure in what order I read the books—but an appropriate set of bookends would be two that I re-read: Tom Perrotta’s Election, a fine comic novel that took me back to high school—I picked this up again in anticipation of my introducing Perrotta as the featured speaker at the Fourth Annual Shaun O’Connell Lecture at UMass Boston in early November; and Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments, which I enjoyed once more in anticipation of starting my Recent Irish Writing course with Alan Parker's very fine movie adaptation of that novel. I also read Doyle’s new collection of short stories, The Deportees, an entertaining gathering of tales of “new Dubliners”—immigrants from around the globe who have dramatically altered the social texture of Dublin's fair city. Bringing back to literary life the central character of Jimmy Rabbitte, the title story is actually a sort of sequel to The Commitments. . . .

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, I was drawn to the work of Andre Dubus last Fall after viewing a fine movie documentary on his life. I then plunged into two collections of his stories—The Times Are Never So Bad and Dancing After Hours. Plus I read Broken Vessels, a very compelling collection of his essays. Dubus is a writer who rewards the reader on every single page—rich and deep. . . . One of the commentators featured in that documentary on Dubus was fiction writer Tobias Wolff, so I decided to spend some time with his work as well. For years his novella The Barracks Thief sat unread on my bookshelf: prompted by his thoughts on Dubus, I finally took it down and gave it a good reading. I found it a very engaging narrative (though I have not quite figured out why Wolff shifts the point of view from third-person to first-person after the first chapter). I subsequently read his fine novel Old School, and I now have his collected stories on my “list” for future reading.

Somewhere in the midst of all that fiction, I detoured for a while and read Watermark, Joseph Brodsky's series of evocative meditations on Venice—on the physical as well as the metaphysical implications of a city built on water. Perhaps because he was a perennial visitor to that remarkable city, Brodksy did not quite register in this book the utter wonderment that I experienced in visiting Venice, all too briefly, for the first time two summers ago: I remember thinking . . . and saying aloud to my wife and daughters—and believing—"No one but Walt Disney could have imagined a world like this"!

I took at least one other detour into non-fiction in the form of When God Is Gone: The Making of a Religious Naturalist by Chet Raymo. I’ve read pretty much everything Raymo has written, and this coming semester I will be teaching his novel The Dork of Cork in my Understanding Literature course (and showing its film adapation, Frankie Starlight). My favorite of all of Raymo’s books, though, is Honey From Stone: A Naturalist’s Search for God. When I first read that book two decades or more ago, I thought, “you could make a religion out of the ideas in there”: in a sense, When God Is Gone is an “applied version” of the ideas and the implications of Honey From Stone.

Then I went right back to fiction, in the form of W. G. Sebald’s variation-on-a-theme narratives about German Jewish experience collected under the title The Emigrants. I was directed to this book by a colleague when I told him about another book I had just re-read (come to think of it): Timothy O’Grady’s altogether winning novel, illustrated with marvelous photographs by Steve Pyke, I Could Read the Sky. Like O’Grady’s novel, Sebald’s book uses photographs as a complement to the literary inscription of memory. I expect that at some point I will put these works into some sort of critical conversation with each other. (Disclaimer: although Timothy O’Grady and I are acquainted, we are no known relation to each other . . .) Those books incorporating photographs in turn led me to Michael Ondaajte's novel Coming Through Slaughter which, among other enterprises, circles around and about a photograph which includes legendary New Orleans cornettist Buddy Bolden.

In recent weeks I’ve been doing some prepping for the Spring semester and also a bit of writing. But I’ve still managed to read a couple of interesting novels. The first was Tinkers, by Boston-area writer Paul Harding. This novel has an intriguing premise—it registers the final and fading memories of a dying elderly man—and a compelling execution to match. Interestingly, the book was published by Bellevue Literary Press, an imprint of the NYU School of Medicine. . . . The other novel was Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, which is of course in the news because of its high-profile film adaptation (which I have not yet seen). I loved the book. It’s certainly bleak—a representation, perhaps, of Thoreau’s observation that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”? But I was engaged from start to finish . . . and think of it as “right up there” with the work of Richard Ford et al. in its capturing of suburban male midlife angst. Sure, Frank and Shep are perpetual adolescents—and so is April—but so much of it rings true in a variety of ways. . . . As I used to conclude my “book reports” back in Junior High School: “I’d recommend it to anyone.”