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.”
Showing posts with label Tom Perrotta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Perrotta. Show all posts
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Monday, October 13, 2008
PERROTTA AND RUSSO: A ONE-TWO PUNCH
This past Sunday I found myself—along with about 75 other bookish souls—at Newtonville Books for a reading by two of my favorite novelists, Tom Perrotta and Richard Russo. I have read pretty much everything by each of these writers, so getting to see and hear them read “live and in person” was a treat.
How much of a treat? Well, I have been so drawn into the world of Russo’s writing that I have twice taken my wife and daughters on detours into the down-and-out NY Thruway towns of Mohawk and Fonda which provide the essential setting for his early novels Nobody’s Fool and The Risk Pool. (Each time we were supposedly stopping for a bite to eat in the midst of racing across upstate New York—and each time we found the dining options so abominable that we ended up having to drive a few miles deeper off the Thruway to a great pizza place in the dilapidated spa town of Sharon Springs.)
Moreover, I have several times used a particular passage from The Risk Pool in my Introduction to Creative Writing course to illustrate a) how a first-person narrative can be used to reveal features of another character and b) how character should be revealed not by telling but by showing through both words and deeds. In this passage the narrator, Ned Hall, is picked up at the Albany airport by his father, Sam Hall; Ned grew up in Mohawk, NY, but has recently taken a job as an editor with a publishing house in New York City:
As for Perrotta . . . well, I am happy to remind all and sundry of the following upcoming event at UMass Boston:
4th Annual Shaun O’Connell Lecture
The Abstinence Teacher (2007), Little Children (2004),
That’s how highly some of us regard Perrotta’s work! And on the basis of his reading yesterday—a humorously “erotic” section from his latest novel, The Abstinence Teacher—the event promises to be both entertaining and substantial.
It also promises to be a writing clinic of sorts, for I have found Perrotta to be no less a master at making a scene (as it were) than Russo is. In fact, I have also used in my Introduction to Creative Writing course a passage from Perrotta’s The Wishbones to illustrate the effectiveness of filtering through a third-person narrative point of view—in this instance, the novel’s protagonist Dave Raymond is the center of consciousness—descriptive details, graphically presented action, and revealing dialogue: the effect here is very subtle, as the reader gets only the same glimpse into the complexity of the characters that Dave himself gets—but the reader also gets a sense of how Dave is slightly disconcerted by his sudden awareness of this complexity. The narrative context for this scene is Dave’s brief encounter with Alan Zelack, a member of a “rival” wedding band, in the men’s room of a banquet complex where both Dave’s band, The Wishbones, and Alan’s band, Sparkle, are playing wedding receptions; four years earlier, Dave had auditioned for Misty Mountain Review, a Led Zeppelin tribute band that Alan was forming, but Alan had rejected him because he didn’t “look the part”:
How much of a treat? Well, I have been so drawn into the world of Russo’s writing that I have twice taken my wife and daughters on detours into the down-and-out NY Thruway towns of Mohawk and Fonda which provide the essential setting for his early novels Nobody’s Fool and The Risk Pool. (Each time we were supposedly stopping for a bite to eat in the midst of racing across upstate New York—and each time we found the dining options so abominable that we ended up having to drive a few miles deeper off the Thruway to a great pizza place in the dilapidated spa town of Sharon Springs.)
Moreover, I have several times used a particular passage from The Risk Pool in my Introduction to Creative Writing course to illustrate a) how a first-person narrative can be used to reveal features of another character and b) how character should be revealed not by telling but by showing through both words and deeds. In this passage the narrator, Ned Hall, is picked up at the Albany airport by his father, Sam Hall; Ned grew up in Mohawk, NY, but has recently taken a job as an editor with a publishing house in New York City:
Between the airport and the Thruway entrance he told me all about the Subaru, which somebody’d talked him into buying. That little shit? he wanted to know, but then he figured what the hell. We’d taught the Japs a thing or two. Maybe they’d learned how to make cars. People said they did, and the guy who’d owned it didn’t want an arm and a leg, so . . .Russo's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Empire Falls, is set in an equally down-and-out river town in Maine. I believe that his latest novel, Bridge of Sighs—which I picked up just on Sunday—revisits the setting of his earlier novels. I look forward to sitting down with it, as Russo tantalized the audience with the finely nuanced first-person narrative of the opening pages.
000“What troubled me, but apparently not my father, was the way people kept honking and swerving around us. My father honked back, waved, and continued talking. People honked hellos at him all the time in Mohawk, where they knew him, and he saw no reason why they shouldn’t in Albany, where they didn’t.
000“Do you have your lights on?” I said finally, noticing that the dash wasn’t lit up.
000“He looked down over the rims of his glasses and had to let go of the wheel to catch them when they fell off. “Should be,” he said.
000The Thruway entrance was a hundred yards away. We pulled in. When the attendant at the gatehouse handed us our ticket, he said, “Your lights, Mac.”
000“Right,” my father said, and he put the Subaru in gear. “Not this shit again,” he said, flicking the light switch in and out. I tried the radio, windshield wipers, cigarette lighter. Nothing. My father tried the turn signals. Nothing. We merged onto the Thruway, regardless, a big sedan careening around us at the last second. I put on my seatbelt.
000“I’ll show you a little trick,” my father said when a double-hitch Peterbilt roared by and tugged at us. Slipping into its wake, my father goosed the Subaru, which strained dutifully until we got right on the Peterbilt’s big, well-lit ass end.
000My father, pleased with himself, looked over at me from above the black rims of his cockeyed glasses. “You worry too much,” he said. “You always did.”
000I checked the speedometer, which was vibrating between sixty-five and seventy. Mohawk was forty black miles away. I wondered if, when we hit the Peterbilt, I’d be able to get down quickly enough to avoid decapitation.
000“I’ve always wanted a Subaru,” I said, trying to sound more full of admiration than terror. “But there’s not much point in owning a car in the city.”
000“I can’t live without one,” my father said, punching in the cigarette lighter, having already forgotten. After a few seconds he began to lean slightly toward the lighter in anticipation of its clicking out. His Camel dangled from his lips as he divided his attention between the big truck only a few feet in front of us and the recalcitrant lighter. Finally it dawned on him. “Argh!” he said, pulling the cold lighter out, examining it, putting it to his stubbled cheek to make sure. Then he tossed it out the window and turned to me. “So,” he said. “Tell me about this editor shit.”
000“Editorship,” I corrected, and pointed at the Peterbilt. “Are those brake lights?”
As for Perrotta . . . well, I am happy to remind all and sundry of the following upcoming event at UMass Boston:
4th Annual Shaun O’Connell Lecture
a reading by celebrated novelist
Tom Perrotta
The Abstinence Teacher (2007), Little Children (2004),
Joe College (2001), Election (1998), The Wishbones (1997),
Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies (1994)
Sunday, November 16th
2:00 pm
The Terrace
(first floor of Campus Center)
That’s how highly some of us regard Perrotta’s work! And on the basis of his reading yesterday—a humorously “erotic” section from his latest novel, The Abstinence Teacher—the event promises to be both entertaining and substantial.
It also promises to be a writing clinic of sorts, for I have found Perrotta to be no less a master at making a scene (as it were) than Russo is. In fact, I have also used in my Introduction to Creative Writing course a passage from Perrotta’s The Wishbones to illustrate the effectiveness of filtering through a third-person narrative point of view—in this instance, the novel’s protagonist Dave Raymond is the center of consciousness—descriptive details, graphically presented action, and revealing dialogue: the effect here is very subtle, as the reader gets only the same glimpse into the complexity of the characters that Dave himself gets—but the reader also gets a sense of how Dave is slightly disconcerted by his sudden awareness of this complexity. The narrative context for this scene is Dave’s brief encounter with Alan Zelack, a member of a “rival” wedding band, in the men’s room of a banquet complex where both Dave’s band, The Wishbones, and Alan’s band, Sparkle, are playing wedding receptions; four years earlier, Dave had auditioned for Misty Mountain Review, a Led Zeppelin tribute band that Alan was forming, but Alan had rejected him because he didn’t “look the part”:
This past Sunday was my first visit to Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore celebrating its 10th anniversary. After the one-two punch of Perrotta and Russo, I will certainly be back for more.A study in contrasts greeted Dave as he stepped into the basement men’s room. Alan Zelack and a priest stood side by side at the urinals, one tall and blond in garish red sequins, the other short and balding in funereal black. As though they’d rehearsed the maneuver, the two men flushed and whirled simultaneously, capping the routine with a synchronized zip. Dave felt like he’d wandered onto the set of a creepy musical.
000“Hey,” Zelack said, instinctively thrusting his hand in Dave’s direction. “Long time no see.”
000Despite a qualm or two on the hygiene front, Dave saw no recourse but to shift the beer to his left hand and shake. It was possible that he shook hands frequently with people who hadn’t washed up since last using the bathroom, but rarely was he presented with such irrefutable evidence.
000“This is Father Mike,” Zelack added, draping his arm around the priest’s shoulder with a proud grin. “We went to high school together.”
000Father Mike offered his hand as well, but Dave didn’t mind shaking it. On some deep, irrational level, he didn’t believe that a priest’s hands could really be dirty.
000“Mike and I haven’t seen each other in what—thirteen or fourteen years?” Zelack grimaced as he performed the calculations.
000The priest nodded. Despite his pleasantly boyish face, his wire-rimmed glasses and receding hairline gave him an air of gravity and wisdom.
000“My parish is in Arizona,” he said. “I just flew up for my sister’s wedding.”
000“Mike and I used to get stoned before gym class,” Zelack announced with a laugh. He shook his head at the mysterious workings of the universe. “I still can’t believe you’re a priest.”
000Father Mike reddened slightly. “That was a long time ago, Alan. We’ve both changed a lot since then.”
000“What happened?” Zelack asked. His curiosity seemed genuine. “Did you have some sort of religious experience?”
000Dave found himself curious as well, even though the priesthood ranked near the bottom of his scale of occupations, way down below prison guard and clerk at the DMV. The celibacy thing was a real sticking point.
000“I don’t know.” Father Mike consulted his clunky black shoes, which, to Dave’s surprise, turned out to be Doc Martens. “I took this solo hiking trip up to the Adirondacks the summer after my freshman year in college. My last night there was this incredible thunderstorm. Like the sky was breaking open. I took off my clothes, stood outside the tent, and let myself get drenched.” Father Mike held his open hands out in front of his chest, as though presenting Dave with an invisible gift. “That was when I realized that my life belonged to God.”
000“Really?” said Zelack. “You became a priest because of a thunder-storm?”
000Father Mike thought it over. He seemed troubled by the question.
000“I guess so. That’s the closest I can come to explaining it. Nothing was the same for me after that.”
000The door behind Dave swung open; three college-age guys in suits squeezed into the rest room, creating a severe shortage of space. In the confusion, Zelack and Father Mike slipped out the door without washing their hands.
000Dave set his beer down on the sink, stepped up to the urinal, and unzipped. On the porcelain lip below, he saw two red sequins and a pubic hair.
Monday, September 1, 2008
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.
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.
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