I have been riding on Charlie's coattails of summer reading, but I have had time to reflect on the sort of books we have been choosing lately. And I have noticed an interesting pattern to my reading choices--each book included at the end an acknowledgment, or bibliography or appendix or the author's research. All are firmly grounded in historical fact. "The Dante Club," "The Road to Wellville," and most recently, British novelist Ian McEwan's 1997 novel, "Enduring Love," are all the creations of gifted novelists who have grounded their stories in deep and meticulous research.
Matthew Pearl is, himself, a Dante scholar, but it is clear that he is equally an expert in the New England poets who are the reluctant detectives of this literary murder mystery. The story is alive with the details of post-Civil War Boston and Cambridge; you can smell and feel the crowds on the horse trolleys, the closeness of Longfellow's study, and the iciness of winter. But more griping is the psychological underpinnings of Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes and the dynamics between them. Clearly Pearl has done his homework.
T.C.Boyle's "The Road to Wellville" like "The Dante Club" has a number of characters that are purely the author's invention, but they swirl around the very real Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the historic phenomenon of the cereal wars of Battle Creek, Michigan. The story is chocked full of bizarre cures, and a reader might be tempted to dismiss them as Boyle's satiric fancy if it weren't for the fact that the novel is peppered with authentic photos of some of these therapies from Dr. Kellogg's sanitarium. Couple that with the serious bibliography and you can tell you are firmly grounded in the world of historical fact.
"Enduring Love," an apt pun for a book about a man putting up with an obsessive and unwanted fixation, is McEwan's 1997 novel. The object of the attention is a science writer, who eventually pinpoints the problem as de Clerambault's syndrome. Yes, that is an authentic psychotic disorder, and not only does McEwan have the appendix at the back of the novel to prove, it, he also includes the case history that was the basis for his novel. McEwan has transformed the case study into a work of literature; nevertheless, the characters and plot have a real life existence.
Although each of these novelists has a unique style, and each book is as different from the other as it is possible to be, what Pearl, Boyle and McEwan have in common are stories grounded in real life events. They are all delving deep into libraries, archives and studies for the bones of their characters and plots, but then crafting their research into works of literary art. Rather than taking their readers on flights of fancy or trips of magical reality, these writers find meaningful themes in the complex and subtle behavior of folks who have walked among us.
At moments I have paused to think about these figures in a way I haven't in other novels. I have really wondered at man's complexity, and infinite variety.
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Sunday, September 12, 2004
Leisure. What a concept!
So, you may ask, what's it like to be retired from teaching? After the sudden hot spell that hit over Labor Day weekend, clearly it's much cooler than the alternative. We remarked between us several times last week how glad we were not to be spending our days in those stifling classrooms, but that's not the only way that retirement appeals to us.
It's the pace of life that changes: the true relaxation that comes when you're not under constant pressure to accomplish some teaching-related task--short-term preparation, long-range planning, correcting student writing, writing college recommendations, going to meetings, analyzing test data, and dealing with school politics. It's all draining and stressful, and it lasts throughout the school year. In the brave new world of immutable standards and accountability, it really carries on through the summer as well.
Yeah, I know, everybody's job is stressful, everybody has more to do than is possible to accomplish in a day, but a fully-engaged teacher has it in spades: You are paid to teach students, which most of us relish doing, but the actual classroom contact time somehow becomes time subtracted from the hours in the day that must be used to do all the other behind the scenes tasks that are piled on. You teach all day, but it's only after the students take off, late in the afternoon, that the job begins. And that part of the job never finishes; you just have to decide on your own appropriate quitting time. For us, that was about usually 10 p.m., if we were lucky.
It's escaping that desperate, hopeless pace that makes retirement so attractive. Suddenly there's time commensurate with what's on the agenda for the day. And when that sinks in, it's glorious. Summer acts as a sort of buffer zone that seems familiar, but now that school has started again, we can't help reciting all the routines of launching the academic year that aren't playing out this year: that first set of writing samples from ninth graders that you need to mark meticulously--preferably this first weekend--to give students an idea of what high school writing standards are going to be, or laying the ground work for the first reflective essay from a 10 GATE class, or working through our English Lit. overview unit tying together writers ranging from the Anglo-Saxons, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare to Kipling and the Clash. And then there's always the department's writing format to plough through.
Part of the relief is not having to repeat one's own brilliant lessons another time, but even better is the sense that you don't have to keep beating your head against that wall anymore. The enterprise is generally one of continually trying your best to give something very valuable to someone who doesn't want it. The energy involved in perfecting the gift and making it useful to each individual student is inexorably drained away in the mere process of handing it over to unwilling recipients--convincing them simply to accept the gift for what it is.
Leisure, then, becomes this refreshing feeling of using one's time effectively, even selfishly, having space to fill rather than infinite obligations to cram into limited space. It's taking one thing at a time rather than everything at once.
And having the opportunity to reflect on the events of our life and times.
It's the pace of life that changes: the true relaxation that comes when you're not under constant pressure to accomplish some teaching-related task--short-term preparation, long-range planning, correcting student writing, writing college recommendations, going to meetings, analyzing test data, and dealing with school politics. It's all draining and stressful, and it lasts throughout the school year. In the brave new world of immutable standards and accountability, it really carries on through the summer as well.
Yeah, I know, everybody's job is stressful, everybody has more to do than is possible to accomplish in a day, but a fully-engaged teacher has it in spades: You are paid to teach students, which most of us relish doing, but the actual classroom contact time somehow becomes time subtracted from the hours in the day that must be used to do all the other behind the scenes tasks that are piled on. You teach all day, but it's only after the students take off, late in the afternoon, that the job begins. And that part of the job never finishes; you just have to decide on your own appropriate quitting time. For us, that was about usually 10 p.m., if we were lucky.
It's escaping that desperate, hopeless pace that makes retirement so attractive. Suddenly there's time commensurate with what's on the agenda for the day. And when that sinks in, it's glorious. Summer acts as a sort of buffer zone that seems familiar, but now that school has started again, we can't help reciting all the routines of launching the academic year that aren't playing out this year: that first set of writing samples from ninth graders that you need to mark meticulously--preferably this first weekend--to give students an idea of what high school writing standards are going to be, or laying the ground work for the first reflective essay from a 10 GATE class, or working through our English Lit. overview unit tying together writers ranging from the Anglo-Saxons, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare to Kipling and the Clash. And then there's always the department's writing format to plough through.
Part of the relief is not having to repeat one's own brilliant lessons another time, but even better is the sense that you don't have to keep beating your head against that wall anymore. The enterprise is generally one of continually trying your best to give something very valuable to someone who doesn't want it. The energy involved in perfecting the gift and making it useful to each individual student is inexorably drained away in the mere process of handing it over to unwilling recipients--convincing them simply to accept the gift for what it is.
Leisure, then, becomes this refreshing feeling of using one's time effectively, even selfishly, having space to fill rather than infinite obligations to cram into limited space. It's taking one thing at a time rather than everything at once.
And having the opportunity to reflect on the events of our life and times.
Sunday, September 05, 2004
Garrison Keillor on the Republican Party
This piece by Garrison Keillor arrived in today's email as a sort of chain letter, and deserves being passed on by one means or the other. I suspect it comes from his just-published book Homegrown Democrat. It's hard to find fault with this analysis:
WE'RE NOT IN LAKE WOBEGON ANYMORE
How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?
By Garrison Keillor
Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned—and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.
In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. “Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,” says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.
Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.
Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy—the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good.
Our beloved land has been fogged with fear—fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.
There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn’t the “end of innocence,” or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.
Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his second term.
This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.
The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.
This is a great country, and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger.
Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It’s a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning.
WE'RE NOT IN LAKE WOBEGON ANYMORE
How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?
By Garrison Keillor
Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned—and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.
In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. “Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,” says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.
Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.
Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy—the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good.
Our beloved land has been fogged with fear—fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.
There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn’t the “end of innocence,” or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.
Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his second term.
This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.
The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.
This is a great country, and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger.
Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It’s a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning.
Summer Reading
One of the great things about summer vacation has always been the unstructured time that allows reading for personal pleasure. The school year was always like a dark tunnel that allowed almost no time to read other than keeping up with a few essential periodicals and, of course, reading student essays. This is a pathetic position for an English teacher to find himself in, but the predictable pattern was that any novel I started after Labor Day was not likely to be finished until Christmas vacation, and if I dared to start something else at that time, it would not be finished until spring break. At that point I was likely to give up entirely until summer started. I could usually read a half dozen sizable novels during that glorious span, choosing and consuming books even more quickly while traveling abroad when there wasn't even household projects or gardening to get in the way.
Now, summer reading can extend year 'round, but I thought I'd use this blog space to record--perhaps seasonally--comments and reactions to what I'm reading. Jan used to ask Englophile readers to recount and review their summer reading in her first or second edition of the year, so naturally, anyone reading this (either of you!) is encouraged to add your own book picks or comment on whatever I've said here. Just click that "comments" link below and you're ready to blog.
THE DANTE CLUB/Matthew Pearl: A literary mystery set in post Civil War Boston/Cambridge. The sleuths here are the American poets Longfellow, Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr., not Jr. the jurist., who does, though, figure here peripherally), their publisher and the historian George Washington Greene. Together they form the "Dante Club," whose devotion is the first American translation of Dante's Comedy. Before Longfellow, the mastermind of the project, and his helpers can even get through The Inferno, Boston's civic elite start falling one-by-one to a serial killer with a penchant for copying Dante's hellish designs. Our club realizes that America's cultural advancement depends on finding and taking out the killer without letting on their understanding of the pattern at work. A first novel; brilliant combination of detective fiction conventions with literary history. Wonderfully researched, buoyant writing.
VERNON GOD LITTLE/DBS Pierre: The quirkiest, most outrageous novel I read this summer. The stylistic homage to Catcher in the Rye is unmistakable, but Pierre makes Salinger seem a little timid and restrained in all directions. Teenage protagonist Vernon G. Little (middle name varies with context) takes us on an insightfully guided tour of trailer trash Texas in the grips of a school shooting hysteria. Black comedy with a silver lining. This is an invigorating must-read for teachers who have plowed though Catcher time and again.
THE LIFE OF PI/Yann Martel: I'd "conferenced" this with several students last year when it was Santa Barbara Reads' novel of the season, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much more there is to the book that I'd previously thought. This is great reading no matter how popular it gets. Martel starts with an authentic sounding "author's note," which blends logically and immediately into the novel so as to smoothly blur the distinction between fact and fiction. Perhaps I'm just gullible, but I got thinking this really happened. There's powerful commentary here about Man's relationship with animals and the essential nature of living creatures. Controlled, precise prose that deserves the accolades heaped on it.
THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE/T.C. Boyle: Boyle writes 'em faster than I can read 'em, but it's hard not to get caught up in his characters and their lives. This one takes us to Battle Creek, Michigan in the days of the charismatic health nut Dr. John Kellogg and the breakfast cereal boom, sharing a good deal of territory with Boyle's other tale of American health fads for the pre-income tax monied class. It becomes clear just how much ground vegetarianism and alternative medicine has had to make up to reach modern-day acceptance.
PASADENA/David Ebershoff: A big, sprawling, melodramatic novel, consciously retreading ground first covered by the Bronte sisters and Thomas Hardy. In fact, the opening chapters welcome readers with a brilliant evocation of Wuthering Heights re-set in Southern California in the waning months of World War II. Having grown up in Pasadena, it is particularly easy to follow Ebershoff's meticulously detailed narrative and descriptions, but the story is about interesting people as well as interesting times. It's an intricately built love story of grand scope that makes you want to tell someone "the story," just as it's being set out in the novel by a real estate agent providing what amounts to "full disclosure" for an important piece of property she's trying to move. Jan hates it when I do that, so it has been difficult keeping it to myself. The writing takes us back to an earlier era when people felt things deeper but talked less than we do now--or at least than contemporary authors portray. It's satisfying reading, but takes a little getting used to if you're coming off something spare, understated, or persistently ironic-- John Updike or Phillip Roth, for instance--but give it a chance to grow on you.
Happy reading,
Chas.
Now, summer reading can extend year 'round, but I thought I'd use this blog space to record--perhaps seasonally--comments and reactions to what I'm reading. Jan used to ask Englophile readers to recount and review their summer reading in her first or second edition of the year, so naturally, anyone reading this (either of you!) is encouraged to add your own book picks or comment on whatever I've said here. Just click that "comments" link below and you're ready to blog.
THE DANTE CLUB/Matthew Pearl: A literary mystery set in post Civil War Boston/Cambridge. The sleuths here are the American poets Longfellow, Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr., not Jr. the jurist., who does, though, figure here peripherally), their publisher and the historian George Washington Greene. Together they form the "Dante Club," whose devotion is the first American translation of Dante's Comedy. Before Longfellow, the mastermind of the project, and his helpers can even get through The Inferno, Boston's civic elite start falling one-by-one to a serial killer with a penchant for copying Dante's hellish designs. Our club realizes that America's cultural advancement depends on finding and taking out the killer without letting on their understanding of the pattern at work. A first novel; brilliant combination of detective fiction conventions with literary history. Wonderfully researched, buoyant writing.
VERNON GOD LITTLE/DBS Pierre: The quirkiest, most outrageous novel I read this summer. The stylistic homage to Catcher in the Rye is unmistakable, but Pierre makes Salinger seem a little timid and restrained in all directions. Teenage protagonist Vernon G. Little (middle name varies with context) takes us on an insightfully guided tour of trailer trash Texas in the grips of a school shooting hysteria. Black comedy with a silver lining. This is an invigorating must-read for teachers who have plowed though Catcher time and again.
THE LIFE OF PI/Yann Martel: I'd "conferenced" this with several students last year when it was Santa Barbara Reads' novel of the season, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much more there is to the book that I'd previously thought. This is great reading no matter how popular it gets. Martel starts with an authentic sounding "author's note," which blends logically and immediately into the novel so as to smoothly blur the distinction between fact and fiction. Perhaps I'm just gullible, but I got thinking this really happened. There's powerful commentary here about Man's relationship with animals and the essential nature of living creatures. Controlled, precise prose that deserves the accolades heaped on it.
THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE/T.C. Boyle: Boyle writes 'em faster than I can read 'em, but it's hard not to get caught up in his characters and their lives. This one takes us to Battle Creek, Michigan in the days of the charismatic health nut Dr. John Kellogg and the breakfast cereal boom, sharing a good deal of territory with Boyle's other tale of American health fads for the pre-income tax monied class. It becomes clear just how much ground vegetarianism and alternative medicine has had to make up to reach modern-day acceptance.
PASADENA/David Ebershoff: A big, sprawling, melodramatic novel, consciously retreading ground first covered by the Bronte sisters and Thomas Hardy. In fact, the opening chapters welcome readers with a brilliant evocation of Wuthering Heights re-set in Southern California in the waning months of World War II. Having grown up in Pasadena, it is particularly easy to follow Ebershoff's meticulously detailed narrative and descriptions, but the story is about interesting people as well as interesting times. It's an intricately built love story of grand scope that makes you want to tell someone "the story," just as it's being set out in the novel by a real estate agent providing what amounts to "full disclosure" for an important piece of property she's trying to move. Jan hates it when I do that, so it has been difficult keeping it to myself. The writing takes us back to an earlier era when people felt things deeper but talked less than we do now--or at least than contemporary authors portray. It's satisfying reading, but takes a little getting used to if you're coming off something spare, understated, or persistently ironic-- John Updike or Phillip Roth, for instance--but give it a chance to grow on you.
Happy reading,
Chas.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
