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.

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.