Capote

Hoffman is magnificent as Capote, capturing every mannerism, and becoming the man. Capote was not exactly a nice person, but certainly was ambitious, and his impact can not be minimized.

Abyssinian chronicles

Isegawa, Moses. (2000). Abyssinian chronicles. New York: Knopf.

Found this book by accident:  I was looking for books by Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro (who actually wrote The remains of the day, a book that became a Merchant and Ivory film), and saw this one; intrigued, I took it. Started to read it, and did consider that it would open up into a wonderful book. But it never did. Stopped at page 70. Perhaps I read one too many works of fiction in a row. Whatever the case, I moved on.

A reviewer was ambivalent about the book.

2 others

Unaccustomed earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri. I just could not get into the stories in Part Two: Hema and Kaushik. Tried, twice.

Book of Salt - didn't like it much

The elegance of the hedgehog

Barbery, M., & Anderson, A. (2008). The Elegance of the Hedgehog. New York: Europa Editions.

Indeed an elegant tale. With its refined taste and political perspective, this is an elegant, light-spirited and very European adult fable. (Kirkus)

Funny, poignant, incisive. Renée Michel is concierge in an upper-crust building whose tenants are all wealthy, some socialists, some not, and all are oblivious to what goes on under their very noses. What they see is what they know, what they expect to see, and all else is dismissed as irrelevant before being even seen. A proletarian autodidact, she ponders Kant, enjoys Tolstoy (her cat is named Leo), and considers the films of Ozu and Wenders sublime. Paloma Josse is the overly-smart 12 year-old younger daughter of a Socialist minister (government and watching rugby and drinking beer, along with entertaining seem to be his interests; nothing can be called a passion for him) and his wife (the only things that approach being passions for her are her psychotherapy sessions and her devotion to anti-depressants). Paloma has a cold war with her parents, and a hot one with her university-aged older sister. Already aware of the vacuity of life, she has scheduled her suicide for the day of her 13th birthday.

Renée and Paloma alternate narratives. Each observes the absurdity and predictability of the other tenants, and keep her interests, intelligence and passions secret. Each delves into her interests. Paloma dissects the emptiness of schooling, both hers (uninvolved teachers, students involved in drugs and sex) and her sister's (predictable pseudo-intellectualism).

When a tenant dies, his family sells the apartment, and the buyer is a Japanese man who immediately sets to remodel the flat. Both his project and his person set tongues a-wagging, and despite their purported lack of interest, many of the tenants are aching to see what is being done inside the 4th floor flat, as well as get to meet the new tenant.

Kakuro Ozu is an elder Japanese man who exquisite manners and mysteriously sublte nature excite the interests of so many of the residents of 7, Rue de Grenelle. In a chance meeting with the concierge, he asks her if she knew the former tenants of his flat. In answering in what she hopes is a disinterested manner, she inadvertently quotes the opening line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (all happy families are alike) . Monsieur Ozu catches it, and supplies the ending of the line (Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way). Renée is aghast that she has, perhaps, given herself away. Indeed, she has, and it is the beginning of an elegant, beautiful, exquisite set of relationships between three kindred souls: Kakuro, Renée and Paloma. Add Marcella, Renée friend, and the story sparkles.

A gem.

The Housekeeper and the Professor

Ogawa, Y¯oko. (2009). The housekeeper and the professor. translated by Stephen Snyder. New York : Picador.

An unique novel, in more ways than one. A housekeeper is sent to care for a mathematics professor who has a memory span of 80 minutes (as a result of a car accident many years back). Thus, every day she must reintroduce herself to the Professor (neither he, nor she, in fact, have names). He asks for her telephone number and birth date, and uses such numbers to familiarize himself, and communicate, with her. One day she tells him she has a 10 year old son, and thus must rush home; he insists she bring him to his cabin and feed him there. On seeing the boy, the Professor nicknames him root, as he says that the boy's head reminds him of the square root symbol - √

The professor teaches them about prime numbers and other kinds of numbers, and turns out to be a rabid baseball fan; but for his memory ending in 1985, he and Root share a love for the Hanshin Tigers. Root and his mother develop love for the Professor.

In reading the book, I developed some of the interest in, and infatuation with, numbers that she did; I also saw parts of Japanese culture that are part of the author's descriptions and narrative. A beautiful, simple, engrossing book. A gem.

Run on, and on, and on ...

The most famous mega-sentence in literature comes at the end of the book, not the beginning. Molly Bloom’s monologue from “Ulysses” (1922) —36 pages in the thinly margined, micro-fonted 1986 single-volume corrected text (and actually two long sentences, thanks to an often-overlooked period 17 pages in) — sets an impossibly high standard for the art of the run-on. It breathlessly binds together all that comes before while nearly obliterating it, permanently coloring the reader’s memory in one final rush. It feels unstoppable, and then it stops.

Francine Prose

Ran across her books whilst working on RFID with Fiction PR

The Visitor

Brennan, Maeve.. (2000). The visitor. Washington, DC : Counterpoint.
Read of Maeve Brennan's name for the first time in a recent book review*, which took me to her writing: mostly she wrote a column for The New Yorker,as "The Long-Winded Lady". This book was mentioned in her biography, and I went looking for it.

Dark and brooding, it is so typically Irish it is almost difficult to accept and say that. I found it difficult to read more than a couple of its small pages every day, yet would not stop reading. A daughter returns to her father's ancestral home, where her grandmother, her father's mother, makes it clear she is not welcome. The grandmother still holds a severe grudge against her son's mother, who left Ireland for Paris, many years back. She tells her granddaughter to go to Paris and make her life there. The latter, Anastasia, is bitterly disappointed in that.

*: review by Rob Nixon of “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” by Dinaw Mengestu.

The deeply felt pain in Mengestu’s novel is offset by the solace of friendship — whether it’s a friendship that hovers on the verge of romance, a friendship between an adult and a child or, above all, the friendships that steady the daily lives of fellow immigrants. Mengestu brilliantly summons up the tribe Maeve Brennan once called “travelers in residence” — men and women suspended between continents; suspended, too, between memory and forgetting.

Successful Spadework

Detective-fiction readers hate saying the long goodbye. They want new cases solved by their favorite sleuths even after those heroes' author/creators have died. Publishers and estates sometimes oblige them. Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe was resuscitated at the hands of Robert B. Parker. Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe entertained more clients with the help of Robert Goldsborough. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is ever with us, thanks to dozens of pastiche artists. But until a year ago, no writer had been allowed to summon the ghost of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, the 1920s San Francisco private eye who starred in three short stories and the classic 1930 novel "The Maltese Falcon."

Hammett's sole surviving relative, Jo Hammett Marshall, his daughter, didn't think anyone anyone could ever do a good follow-up piece on it." 

Joe Gores, a Northern California author whose books include the 1975 novel "Hammett," and who—like Mrs. Marshall's father—worked as a detective before turning to a life of fiction. "I said, 'I can't write a sequel to it,'" he recalls telling Mrs. Marshall during a 2005 celebration marking the 75th anniversary of "Falcon"'s publication, noting that most of the book's main characters by the end are dead or in prison, except for Spade. He proposed writing a prequel instead.


"Vince Emery, the publisher who did Hammett's 'Lost Stories,' gave me a whole bunch of research books," says Mr. Gores. "Jo [Hammett Marshall] sent me books about Sun Yat-sen. That's how I came up with the plot for the Chinese girl. And there's a research librarian at the Fairfax [California] library, Theresa McGovern, who is fantastic." (In tribute, Mr. Gores has Sam Spade encounter a Bay Area librarian named Theresa McGovern.)

The things they carried

The things they carried: a work of fiction. Tim O'Brien. New York: Broadway Books, 1998.

Just could not get into it. Tried, and tried, but couldn't.

An Independent Spirit

In her novels and short stories—and in her life as well—Muriel Spark's ferocity was as evident as her originality

Muriel Spark occupies a puzzling space in the pantheon of 20th-century writers. Undoubtedly great, she resists classification. Even a question as reductive as "Is she a major or a minor novelist?" dissolves into clouds of qualification. Some might argue that she is "major" in her intellectual reach or the power of her prose but "minor" in the heft of her novels—most of them are fewer than 200 pages long. But is Alberto Giacometti a minor artist because his sculptures are so thin?

Pre-existing Conditions

Illustration by Alain Pilon

So Much For That
By Lionel Shriver
436 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99

Excerpt: ‘So Much for That’ (harpercollins.com)


Michiko Kakutani’s Review of ‘So Much for That’ (March 2, 2010)

March 14, 2010
Pre-existing Conditions
By Leah Hager Cohen


It’s like that old joke: A priest, a minister and a rabbi are discussing the beginning of life. The priest says it begins at conception. The minister says it begins at birth. “And you?” they ask the rabbi. “When do you believe life begins?” He gives a shrug. “When the kids move out and the dog dies.”

Shep Knacker, the protagonist of Lionel Shriver’s latest novel, “So Much for That,” believes his life will begin in earnest only when he quits the rat race and moves to Pemba, an island off the coast of Tanzania whose principal attraction is the low cost of living. Or, as Shep thinks of it, “The third world was running a sale: two lives for the price of one.” Never mind that he built his own company and then sold it for a million dollars. Shep persists in feeling like “an indentured servant.” He wants his liberty, he tells his wife, trying to sell her on the merits of his plan: “I want to buy myself.” Her reply: “But liberty isn’t any different from money, is it?” And, sure enough, the questions this novel raises about human existence prove less ontological than economic. Lest one miss the point, more than half the chapters open with a bank statement, underscoring the impression that plot and character development might be tracked via account balance.

Laying aside for a moment the paradox of a “freedom” wholly dependent on the exchange rate between the Tanzanian shilling and the United States dollar — laying aside, too, the dubious implications of a white American seeking to shed his “slave” status by purchasing land on the cheap and building a home in Africa — can a novel that regards human experience through its relationship to dollars and cents have literary merit? Can it be entertaining, rousing, illuminating?

Well, yes. Look at Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, James, Wharton. Or, more recently, Louis Auchincloss, Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney. All have made hearty fictional stew out of the ways money both predicates and instigates action. But the approach works best when novelists account for the fact that money is hardly ever (to paraphrase Richard Yates) the real reason characters act — when it’s treated, rather, as a means to stir up weightier social, psychological and philosophical concerns.

Shriver, it would seem, has laid the groundwork to do just that. Neither stingy with subplots nor shy about taking on timely, complex issues, she tosses plenty of both into the pot with real daring and brio. Almost as soon as we meet Shep and learn of his determination at last to embark on “the Afterlife” (as he has christened his long-cherished escape fantasy), he’s hit with the news that his wife, Glynis, has a rare cancer, peritoneal mesothelioma, which puts the kibosh on his plans. With oddly triumphant coolness, she informs him that she wishes he wouldn’t go: “I’m afraid I will need your health insurance.”

Co-pays, deductibles, out-of-network providers and lifetime payment caps all ­become part of Shep’s vernacular, first as he navigates his wife’s illness and treatment, then as his octogenarian father breaks his leg and must be moved, at Shep’s expense, into a nursing home. The idiom of illness seeps into the way he views his plight: As his Pemba nest egg dwindles, Shep thinks of himself as “hemorrhaging” money. He sees Glynis’s surgery as “gouging a meaty chunk” from his portfolio, “as if to fiscally mirror the violence inflicted on his wife’s abdomen.” Conversely, his thoughts on mortality conform to the lingo of finance: as far as he’s concerned, the fact that Glynis is dying at age 51 means she is “owed” an “astronomical debt.”

While visiting his father, a retired minister, in the nursing home, Shep wonders aloud about “a limit to how much you should pay to keep any one person alive.” His father parses the matter more finely, asking “what a life is worth, in dollars.” If the scene’s ensuing dialogue is salted with phrases (expenditure cap, cost-­effectiveness, generic ibuprofen) that seem more suited to an editorial on the health care debate than to an intimate exchange between mournful son and ailing paterfamilias, this might reflect Shriver’s journalistic status as a regular contributor to The Guardian of London. There’s nothing wrong with writing a newsworthy novel, but at times these prodigiously researched and exhaustively argued critiques read more like excerpts from a position paper.

Health care also figures crucially in the story of Shep’s best friend, Jackson, first because his 16-year-old daughter has familial dysautonomia, a congenital degenerative condition requiring frequent medical interventions, and later because Jackson undergoes elective plastic surgery on a “certain” part of his lower anatomy (for more than a third of the book Shriver alludes to this matter in equally coy-yet-transparent language). Said operation, horrifically botched, leads to several reconstructive surgeries, themselves not only “exorbitant” but “disappointing.” These in turn lead to the ruin of Jackson’s marriage, the bankrupting of his family and the . . . well, I won’t give it away, except to say that a “certain” subplot concludes in a scene worthy of a splatter movie. Jane Austen, anyone?

Although this violent swerve into what seemed like a whole different subgenre initially struck me as jarring (so jarring that I wondered whether Shriver’s intentions could be comedic), on reflection it seems not entirely unpresaged. The amount of calcified rage contained in these pages is awesome. Shep is a paragon of passive-aggression, at once disgusted by and perversely proud of the way he absorbs abuse without complaint. Glynis, who begins the book “stiff, uncooperative and inflexible,” undergoes a lamentable kind of emotional growth after the cancer diagnosis: she develops full-blown schadenfreude. Jackson carries around so much excess anger that his acknowledged pastime is ranting. He can keep it up for pages at a time: about “the immigrants,” “arty bohemian types,” “Mugs and Mooches,” parking tickets, taxes, schools and, of course, health care. Jackson’s wife maintains a disturbingly highhanded calm bordering “on insanity.” Shep’s sister is a caricature of shrewish resentment and cunning. His teenage son is so shut-down he puts Shep in mind of hikikomori, youngJapanese who suffer from such acute social withdrawal that they never leave their rooms. And Shep’s boss (Shep now works for the company he sold) is an uninflected ogre.

Shriver, the author of nine previous novels and the winner of Britain’s Orange Prize in 2005 for “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” tackles her multifaceted plot with energy and grit. She can and does hold forth smartly on any number of subjects, both topical and esoteric. The book doesn’t suffer from vapidity or diffidence or dearth of event. What it lacks is a fullness of wisdom about its characters’ potential for growth. If none of the characters are particularly becoming, it may be because none become in any meaningful way over the course of the book. When at last Shep glimpses a solution to his woes, it isn’t the result of an expanded capacity to perceive worth. The trick turns out to be precisely “putting a dollar value on human life” — in other words, the fulfillment of his misguided sense of ­entitlement.

Leah Hager Cohen, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, teaches at the College of the Holy Cross.

Fiction Liberation Front

A new book: Collected stories, by Lewis Shiner. On the jacket reference is made to a website.

Welcome to the online collection of works by Lewis Shiner. Read this manifesto for a quick explanation of what's going on here.

The manifesto begins: It's hardly news that the Internet Revolution has toppled the traditional short story markets. If you look through the periodical racks at one of the big chain bookstores (what passes for a newsstand in most of the US these days), you'll be hard pressed to find a magazine devoted to fiction. It's been a slow decline since the heyday of the pulps, true, but the last few years have seen even the remaining SF and mystery digests falling back to a subscription model.

What we don't know is what comes next. Some magazines, like Subterranean, have moved online; many have just gone under. Even the idea of a magazine may cease to be relevant. The only thing that seems likely is that whatever future the short story has, the Internet will be involved in it. The thing that's least clear is how--or whether--artists will be compensated for their efforts.

Avoiding prison

Dale, Wendy. (2003). Avoiding prison and other noble vacation goals: adventures in love and danger.New York: Three Rivers Press.

Started reading it yesterday. After Disclaimers, Claimers, and Acknowledgments she has an Introduction: Travel Plans. It begins with a quote from Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters:

Anything you can do is boring and old an perfectly okay. You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive it. You can't imagine any way to escape. There's no way to get out.

As is my wont, I went looking for information on Palahniuk; I knew nothing about him, had never heard of him. There are numerous entries for him in the OPAC. But I wanted more detailed information, so I went to the NY Times website to look for book reviews. And I found quite an interesting essay.


June 8, 2008 - Love the Ones You’re With
By LUCY ELLMANN

SNUFF
By Chuck Palahniuk.
197 pp. Doubleday. $24.95.

What the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk. Their subjects? Porn, crime, pop culture and an endless parade of out-of-body experiences. Their methods? Cliché, caricature and proto-Christian morality. Props? Corn chips, corpses, crucifixes. The agenda? Deceit: a dishonest throwing of the reader to the wolves. And the result? Readymade Hollywood scripts.

Wow.

So not only has America tried to ruin the rest of the world with its wars, its financial meltdown and its stupid stupid food, it has allowed its own literary culture to implode. Jazz and patchwork quilts are still doing O.K., but books have descended into kitsch. I blame capitalism, Puritanism, philistinism, television and the computer.


Chuck Palahniuk has his uses as a shock jock: 73 people (according to him) have fainted during public readings of his short story “Guts.” A riotous account of some disastrous underwater onanism involving a swimming-pool drain, that story excellently delineates the shallowness of American life. But his latest novel, “Snuff,” the dry-as-dust tale of people making a documentary about a woman who wants to break (as the promotional copy delicately puts it) “the world record for serial fornication,” is not so much shallow as bitter. Whatever point Palahniuk meant to make seems to have been lost in a self-induced miasma of meaninglessness — onanism of a more dispiriting sort.


Told primarily from the perspective of three participants, Mr. 72, Mr. 137 and Mr. 600, most of the action takes place in a vast hall where hundreds of men in their underpants plow through junk food and Viagra. All 600 of them have volunteered to spend the day sharing one woman and one toilet. It sounds like an athlete’s foot bonanza! But that’s show business.


On the plus side, the men have been certified free of venereal disease. Nothing to worry about then — except that this is the bottom of the barrel Palahniuk has chosen to scrape. He even dares to make a Melville-related joke (inevitably, I guess) based on the name of the whale. Not wise: Palahniuk’s banality makes the Pequod smell pretty sweet.


This novel reeks not of lust but of the lamp, with many a discharge of nerdy info on everything from cyanide poisoning, Claudius’ wife Messalina, vibrators, defibrillators, gangsta tattoos and Hitler’s inflatable Aryan sex doll to fluffers and intercourse-induced embolisms: stuff most 10-year-olds know — or could Google.


There is a running gag (to which the reader’s response may be to gag and run) about porn film titles, only a few of which — “Gropes of Wrath,” “Beat Me in St. Louis,” “Lady Windermere’s Fanny” — can be mentioned here. Some don’t even attempt to be clever. “Inside Miss Jean Brody” sounds like a title suggested by a newly arrived Martian.


Is this what passes for invention these days? Do Palahniuk’s readers chortle at such things? Have they no pride? There’s a glaring absence of finesse. A paragraph-long description of difficulty with excretory hygiene is offered by one “dude” as an analogy for a bad day, then repeated almost word for word at the end of the book. It’s not that great an analogy.


The telegraphing of the denouement is also out of control, with one allusion after another to genetic links between the star and the people servicing her: a baby was given up for adoption many years before. One possible “son,” the confused Mr. 72, has been perving for years all over a pocket-size rubber edition of her vulva.


Revulsion is expressed indiscriminately: Palahniuk is contemptuous of everything and everybody! Including, I suspect, us. The people in this novel don’t merely speak in clichés, their every action is clichéd. It’s as if, like some grumpy groundhog, Palahniuk has come out of his burrow only to tell us he has nothing to say — unless it’s that porn has ruined sex. But we knew that already.


The floppy plot seeks refuge in cosmetic tips and movie trivia, with a pretty obscene focus on actors who came to grief, if not death, while filming some picture or other. If this catalog of corporeal catastrophe is supposed to justify snuff movies, it fails. The trouble with snuff movies is that the wrong people die.


The risk in objecting to all this is that you look like a fuddy-duddy. But the problem is not the moral turpitude that Palahniuk pretends to promote or tolerate; the problem is his lack of artistry. He has allowed the failings of the culture he criticizes to infect his own work. The feeble irony employed here isn’t up to the job of processing all the detritus he hurls at us. Who will de-trite us now?


Instead of any real creative effort, Palahniuk chucks at us every bit of porno-talk he can muster. But not in a good way. This is no celebration of a field in which America excels — the hatching of new vocabulary — but an exercise in deadening the English language. Johnny One-Note, this book is shooting blanks. Alienation is soooooo 20th century.

Lucy Ellmann’s most recent novel is “Doctors & Nurses.”

Enchanted April

Two English wives search for an escape from the dreariness of unhappy marriages, and go to a castle on the Italian coast for the month of April. Based on a book by Elizabeth von Arnim.

Lottie Wilkins (played by Josie Lawrence - whom, at first, I did not recognize, byt soon realized I remembered from the English , and original, version of Whose line is it anyway?) sees a newspaper advert for an Italian castle being let for April, with servants, and decides she wants to go. In her ladies club she speaks with Rose Arbuthnot (played by Miranda Richardson), and convinces her that the month's respite would do them good. Soon Mrs. Arbuthnot is in charge of the details, and rents the castle from George Briggs (played by Michael Kitchen, of Foyle's War). To offset the cost of the month's rent, they advertise for women to share their month's idyll, and receive, to their utter surprise, only two answers. One is crusty Mrs. Fisher (played by Joan Plowright), a widow whose husband had been part of English intellectual circles in which personages such as Tennyson existed, and who retains a rather elevated sense of herself. The second respondent is Lady Caroline Dester (played by Polly Walker), a society beauty who longs to be away from all the attention of men clawing at her, all the parties she attends, and simply do nothing.

It was a kick to see Joan Plowright, the reason I searched out the film (being on a Plowright binge, having seen Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and Tea with Mussolini recently). An added fun detail was the presence of an Arbuthnot, as there had been a charactert with the same name in Claremont. She plays the character marvelously, and some of her quirks and mannerisms, and vocal inflections, are there.

The Italian countryside is a marvelous added detail. The men in the film, Alfred Molina playing Mellersh Wilkins, Michael Kitchen as George Briggs, and Jim Broadbent as Frederick Arbuthnot, are quite hapless.

A gem.

5 best: Pete Dexter on fiction about families

1. The Complete Stories. Flannery O'Connor. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971. SS O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor died of lupus at age 39, leaving behind two novels, the material for two books of nonfiction and 32 short stories—perhaps half the stories close to perfect. A prime example is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," about a family heading from Atlanta to Florida on vacation. The husband and wife ("a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage"), their three children, a grandmother and her cat are not far into the trip before an accident (startled cat, clawed driver) sends the car into a ditch. Another car comes along, but the would-be rescuers turn out to be three escaped convicts. Then comes one of fiction's great revelatory scenes, when the grandmother, even as the other members of the family are being led off into the woods and executed, bargains for her life with the convict called The Misfit. The grandmother, too, will soon be dispatched—but not before her pleading turns into a religious discussion. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit says, once she is dead, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.'' As this mesmerizing short-story collection shows, O'Connor's tales—many of them about families and distant relations— seem to have come to her built-in with such scenes and lines and characters.

2. Edisto. Padgett Powell. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984. FIC Powell

Here's why—I imagine—J.D. Salinger has never come out of hiding. From the moment "Catcher In the Rye" was published in 1951, every novel written about a precocious kid found some critic erroneously calling it the best book about precocious youth since "Catcher in the Rye." Then one day in 1984 Salinger—again, I'm imagining—had the bad luck to pick up "Edisto," by a young man called Padgett Powell, who had never written a novel before, and the next day the old recluse woke up feeling like Floyd Patterson the morning after his first fight with Sonny Liston. What Salinger would have seen when he opened "Edisto" was what Patterson saw when he looked across the ring into Liston's baleful eyes: the real thing. It's not just anybody, after all, who can write a believable novel about youthful brilliance. "Edisto" is the story of a 12-year-old named Simons Everson Manigault, whose sophisticated-beyond-his-years tone can't disguise how unfathomable he finds the adult world. The mysteries begin with his mother—or "the Doctor," as he thinks of this haughty college teacher—and his father, or "the Progenitor," who is no longer with the family. A mysterious stranger soon becomes the boy's surrogate father, teaching him about life using "one ounce of suggestion and pounds of patience." Padgett Powell is a writer of strange and original gifts. I just can't get over how little attention he receives from the thumb-suckers who sit around bemoaning the state of the arts in America.

3. Straight Man. Richard Russo. Random House, 1997. FIC Russo

The story of William Henry Devereaux, Richard Russo's middle-age university professor, begins with a remembrance of how, as a boy, he had begged his parents for a dog for years and then he finally got one. Devereaux's father, a well-known literary critic not interested in dogs or kids or, in the end, his wife, shows up one afternoon with an ancient Irish setter, who limps into the kitchen five minutes after arriving and dies. As his father buries the dog, Devereaux suggests naming it Red. His father looks at him in disbelief—name a dead dog? "It's not an easy time for any parent," muses Devereaux, "this moment when the realization dawns that you've given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name." Russo's access to the pulse of family attachments can make it all too easy to overlook the power of his great comic novels, like the hugely entertaining "Straight Man."

That is overrating it.

4. A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories. Norman Maclean. U. Chicago, 1976. FIC Maclean

The writing just drops on you out of a tree. Norman Maclean (1902-90), a revered Shakespeare professor at the University of Chicago, published only two books, one an account of the 1949 smoke-jumping tragedy in Montana's Mann Gulch and the other this one, a 104-page novella about two brothers, their father and the mysteries of family love. For the entire length of "A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories," Maclean sustains a voice so precise and beautiful that it becomes part of the story itself—as fundamental and natural to what is here as the characters and the trout-fishing rivers where matters of love and attachment settle out into time. Here's the narrator, one of the brothers, on the devastating moment when a big fish gets away: "The fish has gone and you are extinct, except for four and half ounces of stick to which is tied some line and a semitransparent thread of catgut to which is tied a little curved piece of Swedish steel to which is tied a part of a feather from a chicken's neck." In the end, it's the voice that stays with you, long after the particulars of the story have mingled with other stories and faded away—a reminder of the consequential things that measured, dead-accurate sentences can be.

5. Rhine Maidens. Carolyn See. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981. FIC See

This explosive, driven little novel—which makes you feel, almost as soon as you begin, that it's slipping through your fingers too fast—could well be the most explicit, reasonable description of the craziness of women ever written. I'm not referring to the specific craziness of specific women— which is here, too, and beautifully done—but to a general condition: that wild, random windsock blowing somewhere out there. Carolyn See's novel is built around two women. The mother is in late middle age and bitter, so thoroughly disabused of all happiness and hope that even the idea of them makes her physically sick. The daughter, 20 years younger, has two unremarkable and unlikable children and a similarly unremarkable and unlikable television screenwriter for a husband. The daughter can see for herself who she married but is nevertheless scared to death of losing him. Many writers experience a period of bereavement after they finish a novel—not as bad as your dog dying but bad enough. Finishing "Rhine Maidens" did that to me, just as a reader.

—Mr. Dexter, whose novel "Paris Trout" (1988) won the National Book Award, is the author, most recently, of "Spooner."

Precious

Sapphire. (1996). Push: a novel. New York : Alfred A. Knopf.



This novel is now the basis for a film.








Precious: Based on the novel "Push" by Sapphire, with Gabourey Sidibe in the title role, opens Friday in selected cities.













Gabourey Sidibe (left) and Mo'Nique (right) star in the new movie 'Precious.'

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Juan Williams, himself black, does not think highly of the movie or the book on which it is based:

The black imagination as revealed in gangster lit is centered on the world of drug dealers— "dough boys" who are heavy with drug money—and the get-rich-quick rappers and athletes who mimic the druggie lifestyle. And there are lots of "ghetto-fabulous" women, referring to themselves as bitches, carrying brand-name handbags and wearing big, gaudy jewelry. Attitude and anger are everything. The dispiriting word "nigger" is used freely by black characters talking about one another. There are guns and drive-by murders; hot sex that emphasizes the pleasure of getting it on with no strings attached; women without husbands and children without fathers; people who brag about being street-smart and then drop out of school and find themselves unemployed.

"Precious" is already a cultural event, then, whatever its box-office success turns out to be. The movie gives prominence to the subculture of gangster-lit novels, bringing them into the mainstream. Not only the best but the worst that can be said about these books is they are an authentic literary product of 21st-century black America. They are poorly written, poorly edited and celebrate the worst of black life.

Designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.


Joe Morgenstern reviewed it well in the Journal.

One of the most telling moments of a shockingly beautiful film called "Precious" comes toward the end, and it's hardly more than a throwaway—the heroine glances at a mirror and sees herself. Until then mirrors have reflected her desperate fantasies of who she might be—a svelte blonde, a bejeweled black dancer or cover girl. That's because Claireece "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) has found the sight of her physical self—like the plight of her spiritual self—unendurable. A 16-year-old African-American in the Harlem of 1987, she is mountainously obese, sexually and psychically abused, illiterate, almost mute and pregnant with her second child. The drama begins by giving her spirit voice—it's another notion of "A Beautiful Mind"—and follows her growth from a rageful child with a turbulent inner life to a formidable young woman with a life full of promise and hope.

The full, contractual title of the film, which was directed by Lee Daniels, is "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' By Sapphire." (Geoffrey Fletcher did the screen adaptation.) In addition to striking a blow for books and the written word, the title serves as a reminder that "Precious" is a work of fiction, by the African-American poet who calls herself Sapphire, and something of a fantasy in its own right—an inspirational fable about the power of kindness and caring. (The producers include Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry.)

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George Clooney, below, is one of the stars of 'The Men Who Stare at Goats.'
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That's not to diminish the fable's value, only to note the near-saintly devotion of an alternative-school teacher, Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), and a social worker, Ms. Weiss (Mariah Carey), and to acknowledge the time-lapse pace of the heroine's blossoming under their care. "Precious" is genuinely and irresistibly inspirational. If the filmmaking weren't so skillful and the acting weren't so consistently brilliant, you might mistake this production for a raw slice of life from a Third World country where movies can still be instruments of moral instruction and social change.

If Ms. Sidibe weren't playing the title role, it's hard to imagine what "Precious" would be. She doesn't play it, she invades and conquers it with concentrated energy and blithe humor. (Referring to the sophisticated Ms. Rain and her lesbian partner, Precious says, "They talk like a TV channel I don't watch.") And she's not the only spectacular attraction. The comedienne and actress Mo'Nique is stunningly effective as the heroine's monstrous mother, Mary, who makes a mockery of maternal instincts and comes undone in a ghastly confrontation that goes a long way toward explaining her monstrosity. This is a fine movie, and a deep one. It's about unearthing buried treasure.

GW was a mason

Brown, D., (2009). The Lost Symbol. New York: Doubleday Books.


The Lost Symbol. By Dan Brown
Doubleday, 509 pages, $29.95



The reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, Charlotte Allen,is contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute's Minding the Campus Web site. [The Manhattan Institute is something of a conservative organization.]
She does not seem overly impressed with the book; her review's title puts it: Still More Secrets - Together again, an exciting thriller and a tedious sermon.

She does grant: As District of Columbia resident, I must say that Mr. Brown does a first-rate job of delivering a Cook's tour with duly sinister overtones of Washington's famous sites. I specially enjoyed Langdon and Katherine's narrow escape from the CIA by riding the book conveyor belts of the Library of Congress.

And then she gives herself away: A video unearthed by Langdon depicting numerous highly placed Washingtonians including two Supreme Court justices! wearing full Masonic regalia and participating in a ritual that involves faux-human sacrifice and the drinking of wine from a human skull reminded me of the "Stonecutters" episode of "The Simpsons": "Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do!"

Ah, the Simpsons as a great cultural institution.

It's when Mr. Brown interrupts his storytelling to deliver one of his many lectures on Christian intolerance with pointed digs at the American religious right that "The Lost Symbol" becomes a didactic bore.

The reviewer for the New York Times entitles her review Fasten Your Seat Belts, There’s Code to Crack. She does not seem particularly thrilled with the book, either, though she does not criticize the author's lecturing. In fact, she does praise him, some.

Separate from critics and reviewers, the book sold a million copies today, its first day in the marketplace. And, in the Nassau County OPAC, it has 823 holds on first copy returned of 388 copies, 227 holds on first copy returned of 48 copies (for Large Type), and 120 holds on first copy returned of 19 copies on the CD book.

Five Best: These novels about arduous journeys are transporting, says Rose Tremain

1. As I Lay Dying. William Faulkner. Jonathan Cape, 1930.

The Bundren family, poor white farmers in Mississippi, attempts to keep a pledge to its dead matriarch, Addie, to bury her with her kin a hundred miles away. The coffin is put aboard a mule-drawn wagon, and the Bundrens climb in and set off—just as a storm sweeps in, drenching the travelers and raising the river levels. Every jolt and tip of the cart is felt by the reader in this anguished under­taking, but William Faulkner is charting far more than a hazardous journey. At its core, “As I Lay Dying” is a powerful story of ­domestic entropy, a tale ­perfectly served by its elliptical, multi-voiced narration, in which nobody is ­listening to anybody else. As Addie’s body ­begins to putrefy and buzzards start to circle under the leaden sky, as the wagon is almost lost in the swollen Mississippi, so the secrets and lies of the Bundrens are washed up on some lonely and silent shore, where, still, no individual cry can be heard.

2. Voss. Patrick White. Viking, 1957.

In this novel set in Australia in the 1840s, Johann Voss, a German exile, sets off with a motley team of men to explore the unmapped outback. As he travels deeper into this hostile world, Voss struggles to understand the nature of the sudden and blinding love that overtook him just before his departure, when he fell for Laura Trevelyan, an orphaned young woman shunned in her uncle’s household for her obstinate cleverness. Voss has undertaken his arduous journey in the belief that suffering will make him a saint—a faith that both attracts and repels the men he leads, as it does his beloved. Persecuted by every tribulation the intemperate wilderness can inflict, oppressed by dreams of normality and sexual happiness, surrounded by dying animals and an ­increasingly mutinous crew, Voss stumbles on. Sensing her lover’s torments from afar, Laura—who has taken her dead maid’s child, Mercy, as her own—falls gravely ill with a brain fever. She ­recovers only when all hope for Voss’s return is abandoned. Patrick White, who died in 1990, won the 1973 ­Nobel literature prize and wrote a dozen novels, including “The Living and the Dead” and “The Vivisector,” but “Voss” is his greatest work.

3. Quarantine. Jim Crace. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957.

Judea. Two thousand years ago. A fat and lazy merchant, Musa, lies dying in a tent, abandoned to “the devil’s fever.” Miri, his ­pregnant wife, prays for her violent husband’s death. But while she’s away digging his grave, a young pilgrim from Galilee arrives at their tent and whispers a blessing to the dying Musa before beginning a 40-day fast in a remote cave. When Miri returns, Musa has recovered. For the Galilean is none other than Jesus of Nazareth. Jim Crace’s brilliant and audacious re-creation of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness succeeds primarily through incremental invention, lit by unexpected flares of anarchic humor. He gives ­Jesus four pilgrim ­companions, misfits all, rolling the dice at the possibility of rebirth through self-denial. Into Musa’s materialistic mind Crace puts the idea of claiming ownership of the land where the caves are found and ­charging rent for using them. And for Jesus’ suffering the ­author contrives a resolution that is shocking but also, for many readers, deeply satisfying.

4. Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living. Carrie Tiffany. Scribner, 2006.

In 1934, a “farming train” travels across the sparsely populated lands of northern Australia, distributing aid to poor settlers in the form of scientific data on animal feed, crop production and domestic skills. In the train’s ­“sewing car” is a young woman, Jean, whose romantic vision of the world makes her tragically susceptible to men’s desires. Dragged off the train by an impetuous suitor, Roger Pettergree, a soil expert, and married before she has time to imagine her own future, Jean embarks with Pettergree on a long, doomed journey to establish a scientifically managed model farm on land unfit to support it. In this debut novel, Carrie Tiffany shows perfect pitch, creating a world in which drought and vermin combine to snatch all rewards from human endeavour and yet where Jean’s generosity of spirit imbues the meanest artifact with ­transcendent beauty.

5. The Crossing. Cormac McCarthy. Knopf, 1994.

Cormac McCarthy is ­America’s greatest contemporary poet of the wild. His fictional journeys have strange beginnings and desolate endings, confirming man’s smallness in a world where “God sits and conspires in the destruction of what he has been at such pains to ­create,” as McCarthy writes in “The Crossing.” Here, 16-year-old Billy ­Parham, son of a rancher, rescues a she-wolf from a trap one winter’s morning and decides to light out from home, dragging the wolf behind his horse across the border into Mexico. Billy’s intention is to release the wolf into the inaccessible mountains from which she strayed, but by crossing a geographical and temporal border, he enters a world of anarchy and violence. Piece by inevitable piece, he is stripped of everything that gives his life ­sustenance and meaning. Billy’s ­courage in the face of pain, loss, ­hunger and bereavement, no less than his unsentimental understanding of the lives of animals, makes him a ­remarkable and timeless hero. This heroism is, in its turn, heroically served by McCarthy’s dark unraveling ­sentences that gather like storm clouds and break in freakish thunder.

—Ms. Tremain’s novels include ­“Music and Silence” and “The ­Colour.” Her most recent work, “The Road Home,” has just been released in paperback.

The Novel the Soviets Feared

Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. (1993).translated and with an introduction by Clarence Brown. NY: Penguin Books.

Reviewed by John J. Miller in WSJ on 26 July 2006.

Authors sometimes gripe about the long wait between the completion of a book and its publication. Perhaps the sad case of the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin will help them put things in perspective: He finished his novel "We" in 1921, but it didn't appear in print in his native land until 1988.

The problem wasn't that Zamyatin and his manuscript were obscure or unknown. Rather, it was that they offended communist censors, who correctly understood "We" to be a savage critique of the totalitarianism that was starting to take shape in the years following the Russian Revolution.

While there is no denying the horrors and evil perpetrated by Lenin, Stalin and their heirs, it is worth pointing out that the reviewer, John J. Miller, writes for the National Review, William F. Buckley's media outlet. A look at Miller's bio is telling; this is from the NR's website's bio of him: John J. Miller is National Review magazine’s National Political Reporter, based in Washington, D.C.

Miller is the author of three books: A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America, Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship with France (co-authored by Mark Molesky), and The Unmaking of Americans: How Multiculturalism Has Undermined the Assimilation Ethic.

Just for the sake of full disclosure.