Mark Willen's Blog, page 3
August 29, 2020
Robert Caro's Working
After 40 years in journalism, I thought I knew what it takes to pin down the facts in a story, to get the underlying context, and to get those telling details that put it all in perspective. But reading Working by Robert Caro made me wonder.
Caro, of course, is the author of extensive biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Baines Johnson. His books, which can run over a thousand pages, often take a decade to write. The reason, he explains in Working, is not that he writes slowly but that the research takes so long.
It’s no wonder, considering Caro’s work ethic. To take just a few examples….
In researching the first volume of his Johnson books, Caro found he was having trouble getting a feel for what LBJ was like as a boy growing up on an isolated ranch in the Texas Hill County. So each day after poring through hundreds of pages of documents at the Johnson library in Austin, he drove an hour to the Hill Country to talk to people who had known Johnson in those early years. But no one would say much. They didn’t trust outsiders, let alone one from New York. Caro thought about it and then told his wife (and chief researcher) that they needed to move to the Hill Country (prompting her to ask why he couldn’t write a biography of Napoleon). Caro and his wife rented a house outside Johnson City and lived there almost three years, long enough to win acceptance as a local and the trust of those of who knew LBJ’s secrets. “As soon as the people of the Hill realized we were there to stay,” he writes, “their attitude towards us softened; they started to talk to me in a different way….and they told me details and anecdotes that no one had even mentioned before.”
Then Caro got a tip that Vernon Whitestone, a close college classmate of Johnson he’d been trying to find, had moved to Florida. Where in Florida? The source only knew Whitestone was in a mobile home court in “someplace that had Beach” in its name. With nothing more to go on, Caro and his wife got a map of Florida, made a list of all the places with Beach in the name, and then called every mobile home court in each location to ask if someone named Whiteside was staying there. When someone in Highland Beach said yes, Caro jumped on a flight and the next morning he rented a car, drove to the mobile court, knocked on Whitestone’s door, and got the interview he needed.
Whitestone told him about several important incidents involving Johnson, and when Caro asked another classmate for confirmation, she told him they were all documented in their school yearbook. Caro was confused. He had a copy of the yearbook but hadn’t found it at all useful. He asked the classmate for the page references, and she looked them up. When Caro went to check, he discovered that each of the pages had been carefully excised from his copy. He then went looking for an unabridged copy, which he found in a used bookstore.
These are just a few of the fascinating stories in Caro’s Working, a fitting title if there ever was one. Caro pulls back the curtain to give us a peak at how he operated in researching and writing his biographies of Johnson and before that of Robert Moses (The Power Broker). In doing so, he provides an inspiring lesson for every reporter, researcher, and historian—or anyone else who wants to get the facts right.
Caro’s explains why he goes the extra miles in terms that stand in stark contrast to much of today’s journalism:
Caro is famous for taking his time, working up to a decade on each of his books, which typically run a thousand pages or more. Working is far shorter; at 207 pages, it can be read in a sitting, though it is better to read it slowly and savor it. Caro is 83 and he wrote this short memoir because he’s aware that he may not get to the full-throated version he still plans. After all, he still has one more volume of his Johnson series in the works.
Caro, of course, is the author of extensive biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Baines Johnson. His books, which can run over a thousand pages, often take a decade to write. The reason, he explains in Working, is not that he writes slowly but that the research takes so long.
It’s no wonder, considering Caro’s work ethic. To take just a few examples….
In researching the first volume of his Johnson books, Caro found he was having trouble getting a feel for what LBJ was like as a boy growing up on an isolated ranch in the Texas Hill County. So each day after poring through hundreds of pages of documents at the Johnson library in Austin, he drove an hour to the Hill Country to talk to people who had known Johnson in those early years. But no one would say much. They didn’t trust outsiders, let alone one from New York. Caro thought about it and then told his wife (and chief researcher) that they needed to move to the Hill Country (prompting her to ask why he couldn’t write a biography of Napoleon). Caro and his wife rented a house outside Johnson City and lived there almost three years, long enough to win acceptance as a local and the trust of those of who knew LBJ’s secrets. “As soon as the people of the Hill realized we were there to stay,” he writes, “their attitude towards us softened; they started to talk to me in a different way….and they told me details and anecdotes that no one had even mentioned before.”
Then Caro got a tip that Vernon Whitestone, a close college classmate of Johnson he’d been trying to find, had moved to Florida. Where in Florida? The source only knew Whitestone was in a mobile home court in “someplace that had Beach” in its name. With nothing more to go on, Caro and his wife got a map of Florida, made a list of all the places with Beach in the name, and then called every mobile home court in each location to ask if someone named Whiteside was staying there. When someone in Highland Beach said yes, Caro jumped on a flight and the next morning he rented a car, drove to the mobile court, knocked on Whitestone’s door, and got the interview he needed.
Whitestone told him about several important incidents involving Johnson, and when Caro asked another classmate for confirmation, she told him they were all documented in their school yearbook. Caro was confused. He had a copy of the yearbook but hadn’t found it at all useful. He asked the classmate for the page references, and she looked them up. When Caro went to check, he discovered that each of the pages had been carefully excised from his copy. He then went looking for an unabridged copy, which he found in a used bookstore.
These are just a few of the fascinating stories in Caro’s Working, a fitting title if there ever was one. Caro pulls back the curtain to give us a peak at how he operated in researching and writing his biographies of Johnson and before that of Robert Moses (The Power Broker). In doing so, he provides an inspiring lesson for every reporter, researcher, and historian—or anyone else who wants to get the facts right.
Caro’s explains why he goes the extra miles in terms that stand in stark contrast to much of today’s journalism:
"While I am aware that there is no Truth…there are Facts, objective facts. Discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. And finding facts—through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing—can't be rushed; it takes time."
Caro is famous for taking his time, working up to a decade on each of his books, which typically run a thousand pages or more. Working is far shorter; at 207 pages, it can be read in a sitting, though it is better to read it slowly and savor it. Caro is 83 and he wrote this short memoir because he’s aware that he may not get to the full-throated version he still plans. After all, he still has one more volume of his Johnson series in the works.
July 4, 2020
Review: Apartment by Teddy Wayne
I want to recommend Apartment, Teddy Wayne’s novel about a young man balancing ambition with self-doubt, but I need to warn you that I found it a bit depressing, and given what’s going on in our nation and the world, you may want to put it on your list for later. Just be sure you get to it when you’re ready.
Apartment, a slim 192-page book, is about two young men who become friends and share a sought-after two-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment in New York’s Stuyvesant Town back in 1996, before the complex was sold, deregulated and turned into mostly luxury buildings. They move in together in the first chapter and almost immediately it becomes obvious to the reader that this is a big mistake. Both men are aspiring writers enrolled in Columbia’s MFA program, but that’s about all they have in common. The narrator, who is never named, comes from a privileged Ivy League background with a daddy who still pays the bills, however grudgingly. The other principal character, Billy, is a scholarship student from a small rural town in Illinois who has to work his way through school. Both men are insecure. Billy knows that his education has been spotty and now he’s been thrust into an elite New York society he knows nothing about. The narrator’s insecurity has to do with his lack of friends and his writing; he’s well educated but not talented, and wise enough to know the difference, in part because Billy’s talent is obvious to everyone.
The narrator is lonely, gloms onto Billy, and is generous to a fault, offering a bedroom rent free and picking up the lion’s share of expenses. He reluctantly accepts Billy’s guilt-ridden offer to clean and cook, at least a couple times a week, cementing a relationship of privilege and supplicant that belies the true hierarchy.
Billy also helps the narrator with his writing, heavily editing and making significant suggestions to bring his workshop submissions up to an acceptable level. The narrator tries to return the favor, and drawing on his experience as a copy editor, he’s able to fix some errors, but he’s no dummy. He sees that Billy is the kind of real writer he can never pretend to be. Billy is also good at everything else–with women, with repairing a leaky faucet, and with making friends, to name just a few. Our unnamed narrator is bad at all of these things, lacking any other friends, struggling with sex, and unable to tell a wrench from a frying pan.
Our narrator is fundamentally lonely and as Billy blossoms, so does the narrator’s jealousy. And as Billy becomes the darling of the literary world (at least the critics and highbrow readers that matter to MFA students), the narrator has to gradually accept that copy editing is his true calling. In the world of MFA elites, that’s a weak second to writing (although those of us who write know that’s not really the case, and I found it interesting to note that Wayne gives high praise to his copy editor in his acknowledgments).
Wayne has taken some big chances with this book. The MFA setting has become a cliché used by debut authors who feel a need to write about themselves, but Wayne is no debut author, and he tackles the cliché head on in the opening chapter, which takes place in a writing workshop. As the narrator’s submission, the first chapter in an opus titled “The Copy Editor,” is being eviscerated, the instructor asks “Is the choice of a writer-protagonist in a bildungsroman too facile and predictable?” It may be, but Wayne doesn’t care because in his hands, it’s an empty palette he can use to explore the insecurity of everyone who’s ever taken a chance by putting his work out for public consumption and criticism.
Apartment has gotten good reviews in major publications, and it’s easy to understand why. There’s a lot to appreciate in both the technique and content, and it addresses the near universal them of human insecurity (Kirkus called the novel “a near anthropological study of male insecurity.”) I had no trouble identifying and rooting for the narrator, despite his flaws and mistakes, and the novel gave me a great deal to chew on, including why male bonding is so difficult. It definitely got under my skin, and that’s what fiction is supposed to do. Making you feel happy shouldn’t be a requirement.
Apartment, a slim 192-page book, is about two young men who become friends and share a sought-after two-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment in New York’s Stuyvesant Town back in 1996, before the complex was sold, deregulated and turned into mostly luxury buildings. They move in together in the first chapter and almost immediately it becomes obvious to the reader that this is a big mistake. Both men are aspiring writers enrolled in Columbia’s MFA program, but that’s about all they have in common. The narrator, who is never named, comes from a privileged Ivy League background with a daddy who still pays the bills, however grudgingly. The other principal character, Billy, is a scholarship student from a small rural town in Illinois who has to work his way through school. Both men are insecure. Billy knows that his education has been spotty and now he’s been thrust into an elite New York society he knows nothing about. The narrator’s insecurity has to do with his lack of friends and his writing; he’s well educated but not talented, and wise enough to know the difference, in part because Billy’s talent is obvious to everyone.
The narrator is lonely, gloms onto Billy, and is generous to a fault, offering a bedroom rent free and picking up the lion’s share of expenses. He reluctantly accepts Billy’s guilt-ridden offer to clean and cook, at least a couple times a week, cementing a relationship of privilege and supplicant that belies the true hierarchy.
Billy also helps the narrator with his writing, heavily editing and making significant suggestions to bring his workshop submissions up to an acceptable level. The narrator tries to return the favor, and drawing on his experience as a copy editor, he’s able to fix some errors, but he’s no dummy. He sees that Billy is the kind of real writer he can never pretend to be. Billy is also good at everything else–with women, with repairing a leaky faucet, and with making friends, to name just a few. Our unnamed narrator is bad at all of these things, lacking any other friends, struggling with sex, and unable to tell a wrench from a frying pan.
Our narrator is fundamentally lonely and as Billy blossoms, so does the narrator’s jealousy. And as Billy becomes the darling of the literary world (at least the critics and highbrow readers that matter to MFA students), the narrator has to gradually accept that copy editing is his true calling. In the world of MFA elites, that’s a weak second to writing (although those of us who write know that’s not really the case, and I found it interesting to note that Wayne gives high praise to his copy editor in his acknowledgments).
Wayne has taken some big chances with this book. The MFA setting has become a cliché used by debut authors who feel a need to write about themselves, but Wayne is no debut author, and he tackles the cliché head on in the opening chapter, which takes place in a writing workshop. As the narrator’s submission, the first chapter in an opus titled “The Copy Editor,” is being eviscerated, the instructor asks “Is the choice of a writer-protagonist in a bildungsroman too facile and predictable?” It may be, but Wayne doesn’t care because in his hands, it’s an empty palette he can use to explore the insecurity of everyone who’s ever taken a chance by putting his work out for public consumption and criticism.
Apartment has gotten good reviews in major publications, and it’s easy to understand why. There’s a lot to appreciate in both the technique and content, and it addresses the near universal them of human insecurity (Kirkus called the novel “a near anthropological study of male insecurity.”) I had no trouble identifying and rooting for the narrator, despite his flaws and mistakes, and the novel gave me a great deal to chew on, including why male bonding is so difficult. It definitely got under my skin, and that’s what fiction is supposed to do. Making you feel happy shouldn’t be a requirement.
March 8, 2020
Review: Joe Moran Provides Essential Advice for Writers
First You Write a Sentence is the best book about writing I’ve ever read, and that says a lot. As a journalist for forty years and now a novelist for ten, I live by the written word, with a passion for improvement. Joe Morgan is my soulmate.
Morgan begins his book quoting Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, noting while the novel is rich in substance, what Flaubert really cared about were its sentences: their rhythm, wit, beauty, style, and effect. These are values that Moran shares, and so too should anyone who puts pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.
Moran is an academic (professor of English at Liverpool John Moores University), and he aims a lot of his barbs and advice at academic writing, but everything he says applies just as much to journalism, novels, blogs, and everyday emails. He does a wonderful job of taking apart sentences, the building blocks of any writing, as well as words, syllables, and vowels.
I can’t do justice to Moran’s analysis and advice, and he’s reluctant to fall into a rule-making mode. But in general, he urges writers to love verbs and go easy on nouns as well as adjectives and adverbs. He advocates cutting syllables wherever possible (use start instead of begin; enough, not sufficient; person, not individual; dead instead of deceased), and he suggests ending sentences on a stressed syllable and shows what a difference that can make.
He is particularly good on rhythm, syntax, and structure. He shows how effective simple conjunctions–and, but–are, and he warns against the overuse of dependent clauses, both long and short. Consider the difference, he says, in the following:
He opened his eyes and was struck.
When he opened his eyes, he was struck.
Having opened his eyes, he was struck.
The first is obviously the strongest, though so many novice writers bend over backwards to use dependent clauses for a variation that isn’t needed and is downright harmful.
Moran also gets into the importance of vowel sounds and consonant sounds, and how important the mix can be. He suggests stripping your pages of “shun” words (evaluation, function) and “tate” words (facilitate, necessitate) which too often become mumblespeak, especially in academic writing. And of course he spends a lot of time on the importance of varying sentence length.
If you want to write better, read this book several times (it’s become a permanent fixture on my bedside table). And don’t miss the fact that whatever point Moran wants to make in a given paragraph, he is doing it with sentences that do exactly what he preaches.
Morgan begins his book quoting Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, noting while the novel is rich in substance, what Flaubert really cared about were its sentences: their rhythm, wit, beauty, style, and effect. These are values that Moran shares, and so too should anyone who puts pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.
Moran is an academic (professor of English at Liverpool John Moores University), and he aims a lot of his barbs and advice at academic writing, but everything he says applies just as much to journalism, novels, blogs, and everyday emails. He does a wonderful job of taking apart sentences, the building blocks of any writing, as well as words, syllables, and vowels.
I can’t do justice to Moran’s analysis and advice, and he’s reluctant to fall into a rule-making mode. But in general, he urges writers to love verbs and go easy on nouns as well as adjectives and adverbs. He advocates cutting syllables wherever possible (use start instead of begin; enough, not sufficient; person, not individual; dead instead of deceased), and he suggests ending sentences on a stressed syllable and shows what a difference that can make.
He is particularly good on rhythm, syntax, and structure. He shows how effective simple conjunctions–and, but–are, and he warns against the overuse of dependent clauses, both long and short. Consider the difference, he says, in the following:
He opened his eyes and was struck.
When he opened his eyes, he was struck.
Having opened his eyes, he was struck.
The first is obviously the strongest, though so many novice writers bend over backwards to use dependent clauses for a variation that isn’t needed and is downright harmful.
Moran also gets into the importance of vowel sounds and consonant sounds, and how important the mix can be. He suggests stripping your pages of “shun” words (evaluation, function) and “tate” words (facilitate, necessitate) which too often become mumblespeak, especially in academic writing. And of course he spends a lot of time on the importance of varying sentence length.
If you want to write better, read this book several times (it’s become a permanent fixture on my bedside table). And don’t miss the fact that whatever point Moran wants to make in a given paragraph, he is doing it with sentences that do exactly what he preaches.
June 6, 2019
Review: An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Fiction is at its most powerful when it lets us walk in someone else’s shoes, teaching us to empathize with the kind of people who might otherwise never cross our paths. In An American Marriage, Tayari Jones does this while exploring one of the most disturbing and seemingly intractable issues in America: the incarceration of innocent people, especially people of color, by a justice system with inherent biases.
On the surface, the story is a familiar one. Roy Hamilton and Celestial Davenport are a couple in their late twenties, both establishing themselves professionally, struggling to straighten out the kinks in their year-old marriage, unsure about whether it’s time to start a family, when suddenly Roy is accused of rape. There’s never any doubt that he’s innocent, but the victim says otherwise, and Roy is convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison. He serves five before his lawyer works a miracle, but that’s more than enough time to severely test the couple’s relationship in every way.
Jones pointedly pays homage in the text to James Baldwin, whose classic novel If Beale Street Could Talk also tells the story of a couple torn apart when a man is falsely accused of rape. But the similarities in the two novels go only so far. Jones’ heroes are older, better educated, with good jobs and bright futures. They’ve done everything “right” and stand ready to reap the rewards. But the couple is black, and in the end, none of the rest matters.
But this isn’t a novel limited to the pain of racial prejudice. Oh, there’s plenty of that, but because this couple fits none of the stereotypes often associated with this problem—no broken family, no childhood in a crime-infested neighborhood, no lack of education, no drug addiction—it is impossible for me or other white readers to distance ourselves from their story or pretend we’d never get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time as they were. What makes the novel so powerful is that we can’t escape the notion that their plight could be ours; it can happen to anyone, though there’s no denying it happens much more often to African Americans just because they are African Americans.
While the dilemma facing Roy and Celestial is hardly unique, Jones takes a highly original approach to tell their story. She lets each character speak directly to the reader, telling the story of their relationship in first-person chapters from alternate points of view, later adding a third perspective to what becomes a love triangle. Each of the characters gets to plead, in a way, for the reader’s understanding and support. The result is to cast the moral dilemma in ways that suggest no one is the good guy or the bad guy; they are all victims.
While the first-person chapters are touching and honest, the heart of the novel is 50 pages of letters that Roy and Celestial write each other while he is in prison. The letters are so intimate, with so much revealed between the lines, that it’s hard not to shed tears as you realize what they’re going through. Jones wisely avoids dwelling on the horrors of prison life (a separate tragedy) but instead focuses on the way incarceration affects the couple’s relationship.
Roy, of course, has plenty of time sitting around missing Celestial, even as he’s forced to learn a new way of life if he is to survive prison. Celestial is much busier building a career, but she feels a different kind of loneliness that forces her to reconsider her relationship with Roy, which is gradually growing more distant. Though determined to support and wait for him at first, Celestial finds that harder to do as the weeks grow into months and years, making her wonder about her responsibilities to Roy and how much she wants to sacrifice to make amends to Roy for society’s cruelties.
Jones told NPR that the seed for the novel came when she overheard a couple arguing at a mall. The woman said to her companion, “Roy, you know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years,” and he responded, “I don’t know what you’re talking about; this wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.” It’s fascinating to see what Jones has extrapolated from that snippet of overheard conversation.
When If Beale Street Could Talk was published in 1974, the reviews were decidedly mixed, with several mainstream critics complaining that the novel was “dated,” as though the civil rights legislation of the 1960s had laid racism to rest. If only.
Jones does not preach, and she has a bigger goal in mind than exposing the injustices of the prison system. This is not a novel to be missed.
On the surface, the story is a familiar one. Roy Hamilton and Celestial Davenport are a couple in their late twenties, both establishing themselves professionally, struggling to straighten out the kinks in their year-old marriage, unsure about whether it’s time to start a family, when suddenly Roy is accused of rape. There’s never any doubt that he’s innocent, but the victim says otherwise, and Roy is convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison. He serves five before his lawyer works a miracle, but that’s more than enough time to severely test the couple’s relationship in every way.
Jones pointedly pays homage in the text to James Baldwin, whose classic novel If Beale Street Could Talk also tells the story of a couple torn apart when a man is falsely accused of rape. But the similarities in the two novels go only so far. Jones’ heroes are older, better educated, with good jobs and bright futures. They’ve done everything “right” and stand ready to reap the rewards. But the couple is black, and in the end, none of the rest matters.
But this isn’t a novel limited to the pain of racial prejudice. Oh, there’s plenty of that, but because this couple fits none of the stereotypes often associated with this problem—no broken family, no childhood in a crime-infested neighborhood, no lack of education, no drug addiction—it is impossible for me or other white readers to distance ourselves from their story or pretend we’d never get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time as they were. What makes the novel so powerful is that we can’t escape the notion that their plight could be ours; it can happen to anyone, though there’s no denying it happens much more often to African Americans just because they are African Americans.
While the dilemma facing Roy and Celestial is hardly unique, Jones takes a highly original approach to tell their story. She lets each character speak directly to the reader, telling the story of their relationship in first-person chapters from alternate points of view, later adding a third perspective to what becomes a love triangle. Each of the characters gets to plead, in a way, for the reader’s understanding and support. The result is to cast the moral dilemma in ways that suggest no one is the good guy or the bad guy; they are all victims.
While the first-person chapters are touching and honest, the heart of the novel is 50 pages of letters that Roy and Celestial write each other while he is in prison. The letters are so intimate, with so much revealed between the lines, that it’s hard not to shed tears as you realize what they’re going through. Jones wisely avoids dwelling on the horrors of prison life (a separate tragedy) but instead focuses on the way incarceration affects the couple’s relationship.
Roy, of course, has plenty of time sitting around missing Celestial, even as he’s forced to learn a new way of life if he is to survive prison. Celestial is much busier building a career, but she feels a different kind of loneliness that forces her to reconsider her relationship with Roy, which is gradually growing more distant. Though determined to support and wait for him at first, Celestial finds that harder to do as the weeks grow into months and years, making her wonder about her responsibilities to Roy and how much she wants to sacrifice to make amends to Roy for society’s cruelties.
Jones told NPR that the seed for the novel came when she overheard a couple arguing at a mall. The woman said to her companion, “Roy, you know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years,” and he responded, “I don’t know what you’re talking about; this wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.” It’s fascinating to see what Jones has extrapolated from that snippet of overheard conversation.
When If Beale Street Could Talk was published in 1974, the reviews were decidedly mixed, with several mainstream critics complaining that the novel was “dated,” as though the civil rights legislation of the 1960s had laid racism to rest. If only.
Jones does not preach, and she has a bigger goal in mind than exposing the injustices of the prison system. This is not a novel to be missed.
November 10, 2018
Great War Novels for Veterans' Day
There are many ways to honor the men and women who put on a uniform and risk it all for the nations that send them into war in the name of duty and patriotism. One obvious way is to put their stories in writing—fiction or nonfiction—so that others can read and remember the sacrifices they made. Among literature’s many intrinsic values is its ability to give readers a sense of what other people experience, to help us understand, empathize, and learn from the thing that others have done.
As we mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, I’d like to offer a very personal list of 11 great war novels to commemorate the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. This is not your typical “best of” list. I’ve left out the obvious candidates—War and Peace, Catch-22, All Quiet on the Western Front, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Red Badge of Courage—on the assumption that you’ve already read those. Instead we’re offering a list of equally thought- provoking works that honor our soldiers as well as the friends and families left behind. They’re hardly unknown, but there’s bound to be a few here that you’re not familiar with. I begin with a a few focused on World War I:
barker.jpg
Regeneration by Pat Barker is the first book in a World War I trilogy based on the actual psychiatric treatment of British military officers suffering from shell shock, including poets Sigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Barker’s technique allows her to describe the war through the words of those who suffered its unmitigated mental and physical horrors, and the physicians who struggled to help them.
A Very Long Engagement by Sébastien Japrisot is a World War I epic about the murder of five wounded French soldiers by their own comrades, the coverup that inevitably follows, and the relentless quest of one of the men’s fiancées to find out what really happened. Like most of the great war novels, it brings a better understanding of both the horrors and kindnesses brought about by war.
August 1914 is the first installment in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic Red Wheel narrative about the events before and during the First World War. This first volume examines the assassination of tsarist Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, a key event leading to the 1917 Revolution, as well as the start of the war and the disastrous Russian offensive into East Prussia. Told through alternating viewpoints, many in sharp disagreement about the events, the book offers insights on political terrorism as well as war between nations.
Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières is a tale of love and war during the Italian and German occupation of the Greek island of Cephallonia in the Second World War. Captain Corelli is a reluctant officer who gets caught in the worst kind of dilemma when he falls in love with a willful, beautiful young woman. The language is haunting, the mood overpowering.
Cold Mountain by Charles Fraser aims its spotlight on a disillusioned Confederate soldier who survives a wound that was expected to be fatal. When he recovers and is sent back to the front, he chooses instead to desert and embarks on a dangerous and lonely odyssey through the devastated South.
Cormac.jpg
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is set on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s. The principal character is “the Kid,” a 14-year-old from Tennessee who witnesses the violence that marked America’s expansion to the West when he hooks up with a gang of murderers who sell the scalps of Native Americans on a burgeoning black market.
History: A Novel by Elsa Morante is the powerful and unforgiving saga of a widowed schoolteacher’s attempt to raise two sons, one a teenager who treats war as his playground, and one born right after the war, the result of a rape by a Nazi soldier. Morante, who spent a year hiding in Italy during the Nazi occupation, is able to focus both on the political events driven by the powerful and wealthy and on the ordinary people struggling to stay alive.
Going After Cacciato is one of several Vietnam War books by Tim O’Brien. He’s better known for The Things They Carried, a short story that brilliantly shines a spotlight on the struggles of a group of infantrymen by examining the objects they carried with them. Going After Cacciato also focuses on the plight of the enlisted (usually drafted) men in Vietnam, this time by tracing the events that ensue after one of them decides to go AWOL and walk from Vietnam to France.
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje tells the story of four damaged people living out the end of World War II in an Italian monastery: a nameless man critically burned, his Canadian nurse, a Canadian-Italian thief, and an Indian sapper in the British Army. Alternately haunting, harrowing, beautiful, and disturbing, The English Patient slowly weaves these characters together, only to pull them apart in the end.
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, published just last year, is a graceful novel about the impossible burdens faced by American troops in Iraq. Powers, who enlisted at age 17 and served as a machine gunner in the war, focuses much of the novel on a bloody and ultimately fruitless campaign to control the northern city of Al Tafar. His principal character, a 21-year-old private who feels little purpose or determination, is pushed by a sergeant who enforces his orders with punches and a commanding officer who gives pep talks reminiscent of Patton.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows is a delightful book set just after World War II has ended, when civilians and soldiers alike are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. Shaffer uses letters from the members of a most unconventional book group on the occupied Channel Islands to tell personal war stories that are both touching and inspiring.
As we mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, I’d like to offer a very personal list of 11 great war novels to commemorate the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. This is not your typical “best of” list. I’ve left out the obvious candidates—War and Peace, Catch-22, All Quiet on the Western Front, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Red Badge of Courage—on the assumption that you’ve already read those. Instead we’re offering a list of equally thought- provoking works that honor our soldiers as well as the friends and families left behind. They’re hardly unknown, but there’s bound to be a few here that you’re not familiar with. I begin with a a few focused on World War I:
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Regeneration by Pat Barker is the first book in a World War I trilogy based on the actual psychiatric treatment of British military officers suffering from shell shock, including poets Sigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Barker’s technique allows her to describe the war through the words of those who suffered its unmitigated mental and physical horrors, and the physicians who struggled to help them.
A Very Long Engagement by Sébastien Japrisot is a World War I epic about the murder of five wounded French soldiers by their own comrades, the coverup that inevitably follows, and the relentless quest of one of the men’s fiancées to find out what really happened. Like most of the great war novels, it brings a better understanding of both the horrors and kindnesses brought about by war.
August 1914 is the first installment in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic Red Wheel narrative about the events before and during the First World War. This first volume examines the assassination of tsarist Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, a key event leading to the 1917 Revolution, as well as the start of the war and the disastrous Russian offensive into East Prussia. Told through alternating viewpoints, many in sharp disagreement about the events, the book offers insights on political terrorism as well as war between nations.
Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières is a tale of love and war during the Italian and German occupation of the Greek island of Cephallonia in the Second World War. Captain Corelli is a reluctant officer who gets caught in the worst kind of dilemma when he falls in love with a willful, beautiful young woman. The language is haunting, the mood overpowering.
Cold Mountain by Charles Fraser aims its spotlight on a disillusioned Confederate soldier who survives a wound that was expected to be fatal. When he recovers and is sent back to the front, he chooses instead to desert and embarks on a dangerous and lonely odyssey through the devastated South.
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Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is set on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s. The principal character is “the Kid,” a 14-year-old from Tennessee who witnesses the violence that marked America’s expansion to the West when he hooks up with a gang of murderers who sell the scalps of Native Americans on a burgeoning black market.
History: A Novel by Elsa Morante is the powerful and unforgiving saga of a widowed schoolteacher’s attempt to raise two sons, one a teenager who treats war as his playground, and one born right after the war, the result of a rape by a Nazi soldier. Morante, who spent a year hiding in Italy during the Nazi occupation, is able to focus both on the political events driven by the powerful and wealthy and on the ordinary people struggling to stay alive.
Going After Cacciato is one of several Vietnam War books by Tim O’Brien. He’s better known for The Things They Carried, a short story that brilliantly shines a spotlight on the struggles of a group of infantrymen by examining the objects they carried with them. Going After Cacciato also focuses on the plight of the enlisted (usually drafted) men in Vietnam, this time by tracing the events that ensue after one of them decides to go AWOL and walk from Vietnam to France.
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje tells the story of four damaged people living out the end of World War II in an Italian monastery: a nameless man critically burned, his Canadian nurse, a Canadian-Italian thief, and an Indian sapper in the British Army. Alternately haunting, harrowing, beautiful, and disturbing, The English Patient slowly weaves these characters together, only to pull them apart in the end.
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, published just last year, is a graceful novel about the impossible burdens faced by American troops in Iraq. Powers, who enlisted at age 17 and served as a machine gunner in the war, focuses much of the novel on a bloody and ultimately fruitless campaign to control the northern city of Al Tafar. His principal character, a 21-year-old private who feels little purpose or determination, is pushed by a sergeant who enforces his orders with punches and a commanding officer who gives pep talks reminiscent of Patton.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows is a delightful book set just after World War II has ended, when civilians and soldiers alike are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. Shaffer uses letters from the members of a most unconventional book group on the occupied Channel Islands to tell personal war stories that are both touching and inspiring.
July 11, 2018
Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet
Ali Smith—Scottish, 55, fearless—has already made a reputation as one of most ambitious, offbeat, and mesmerizing novelists of our time. Now she’s pushing it a step further with an unusual “seasonal” quartet. The first two volumes, Autumn and Winter, are already out, and you better hurry up and read them because you want to be ready when Spring arrives. And it won’t be long.
The novels are being rushed out, but Smith has her reasons. She wants to put her mark on current events. Most writers of contemporary fiction struggle with an age-old dilemma: Is it better to be timely or timeless? Smith is one of the few with the talent to be both.
Autumn was published in 2017, barely eleven months after the Brexit vote, and it serves partially as a novel of protest over what Smith clearly believes was a misguided decision by Britain to leave the European Union. The novel is set in a small village a week after the vote, and half of the local people won’t talk to the other half because of it. Brexit also is an issue in Winter (there’s a marvelous bit in which Boris Johnson is compared to Samuel Johnson and found wanting), but the American election and immigration policy also play big roles, with Smith going so far as to quote some of Trump’s more controversial bits.
This is not to imply these novels are mostly political protests. Yes, they capture the conflicts and struggles of the day but in a way that
shows their roots in historical precedents. Smith does that, in part, with discerning references to literature, particularly the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Huxley, cleverly finding much in their time-tested novels that still applies today.
Autumn is first and foremost a novel about the friendship between Elizabeth Demand and her neighbor Daniel Gluck (And yes, every name in both books is fraught with meaning). They met when she was eight and he was seventy-six, and now, at 101, he is on his deathbed and Elisabeth has come home to sit by his bedside. Theirs is a charming, deep, friendship, filled with meaningful conversations about art, culture, imagination, and literature—the kind of friendship we can all envy. Smith artfully uses flashbacks to trace its roots. Consider their first meeting:
“Very pleased to meet you,” Daniel says. “Finally.”
“How do you mean, finally?” Elisabeth asks. “We only moved here six weeks ago.”
“The lifelong friends,” Daniel says. “We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.”
Daniel doesn’t appear in the opening chapter. That’s devoted to Elisabeth’s day-long effort to renew her passport, an all-too-real, hilarious episode that ends in failure because Elisabeth’s face is the wrong size. While she waits hours to be rejected, she reads Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a title taken from Shakespeare’s Tempest.
When she arrives at his bedside, he greets her with the same greeting he’s used since he’s known her—“What are you reading?” Later she reads him Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, a novel Smith borrows from when she describes her country’s views of the Brexit vote: “All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the county, people felt it was the right thing. All across the county, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won.” (Daniel, half asleep, twists the opening line of Dickens to “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.”
Shakespeare and Dickens also play prominent roles in Winter, which alternately feels like a rewrite of A Christmas Carol and Cymbeline. The plot opens with Sophie Cravens, a Scrooge-like character if there ever was one, chatting to a disembodied child’s head that dances around her like the light of Christmas past. Sophie is expecting her son Arthur and his former girlfriend Charlotte for Christmas dinner, but when they arrive (Art has actually hired a homeless immigrant named Lux to pretend she is Charlotte), Sophie can offer neither a bed (though her house has 15 bedrooms) nor food (only a bag of walnuts and a half a jar of glace cherries).
Art calls Sophie’s estranged sister Iris (aptly nicknamed “Ire”), and she soon arrives with bags of groceries to fill the fridge and rekindle her age-old battles with her sibling. It’s not long before we’re treated to the kind of dysfunctional Christmas dinner befitting a dysfunctional family (though the conversation at this one is far more engaging than at yours or mine). Lux proceeds to play the role of the uninvited guest who speaks the truth when others prefer to remain silent. (Think Paulina in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale or Amber in Smith’s earlier novel, The Accidental.)
Winter is not as powerful a novel as Autumn. There’s something more rushed about it that leaves it lacking focus, with a few too many preachy speeches and maybe a little more politics than necessary to make the point. Writing in the The Chicago Tribune, Charles Finch describes it as Smith’s angriest work. I haven’t read enough of her work to judge that, but it clearly has a sharper edge than Autumn.
Winter draws a lot from Shakespeare Cymbeline, which Sophia notes is “about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning. (James Wood writing in The New Yorker calls Winter a postmodern Shakespearean comedy.)
And Lux captures the essence of that when she explains to her hosts why she emigrated to England from her native Croatia:
I read [Cymbeline] and I thought, if this writer from this place can make this mad and bitter mess into this graceful thing it is at the end, where the balance comes back and all the lies are revealed and all the losses are compensated, and that’s the place on earth he comes from, that’s the place that made him, then that’s the place I’m going, I’ll go there, I’ll live there.”
It's a comforting hope, but the way things are going, I fear it will just get Lux deported.
The novels are being rushed out, but Smith has her reasons. She wants to put her mark on current events. Most writers of contemporary fiction struggle with an age-old dilemma: Is it better to be timely or timeless? Smith is one of the few with the talent to be both.
Autumn was published in 2017, barely eleven months after the Brexit vote, and it serves partially as a novel of protest over what Smith clearly believes was a misguided decision by Britain to leave the European Union. The novel is set in a small village a week after the vote, and half of the local people won’t talk to the other half because of it. Brexit also is an issue in Winter (there’s a marvelous bit in which Boris Johnson is compared to Samuel Johnson and found wanting), but the American election and immigration policy also play big roles, with Smith going so far as to quote some of Trump’s more controversial bits.
This is not to imply these novels are mostly political protests. Yes, they capture the conflicts and struggles of the day but in a way that
shows their roots in historical precedents. Smith does that, in part, with discerning references to literature, particularly the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Huxley, cleverly finding much in their time-tested novels that still applies today.
Autumn is first and foremost a novel about the friendship between Elizabeth Demand and her neighbor Daniel Gluck (And yes, every name in both books is fraught with meaning). They met when she was eight and he was seventy-six, and now, at 101, he is on his deathbed and Elisabeth has come home to sit by his bedside. Theirs is a charming, deep, friendship, filled with meaningful conversations about art, culture, imagination, and literature—the kind of friendship we can all envy. Smith artfully uses flashbacks to trace its roots. Consider their first meeting:
“Very pleased to meet you,” Daniel says. “Finally.”
“How do you mean, finally?” Elisabeth asks. “We only moved here six weeks ago.”
“The lifelong friends,” Daniel says. “We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.”
Daniel doesn’t appear in the opening chapter. That’s devoted to Elisabeth’s day-long effort to renew her passport, an all-too-real, hilarious episode that ends in failure because Elisabeth’s face is the wrong size. While she waits hours to be rejected, she reads Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a title taken from Shakespeare’s Tempest.
When she arrives at his bedside, he greets her with the same greeting he’s used since he’s known her—“What are you reading?” Later she reads him Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, a novel Smith borrows from when she describes her country’s views of the Brexit vote: “All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the county, people felt it was the right thing. All across the county, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won.” (Daniel, half asleep, twists the opening line of Dickens to “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.”
Shakespeare and Dickens also play prominent roles in Winter, which alternately feels like a rewrite of A Christmas Carol and Cymbeline. The plot opens with Sophie Cravens, a Scrooge-like character if there ever was one, chatting to a disembodied child’s head that dances around her like the light of Christmas past. Sophie is expecting her son Arthur and his former girlfriend Charlotte for Christmas dinner, but when they arrive (Art has actually hired a homeless immigrant named Lux to pretend she is Charlotte), Sophie can offer neither a bed (though her house has 15 bedrooms) nor food (only a bag of walnuts and a half a jar of glace cherries).
Art calls Sophie’s estranged sister Iris (aptly nicknamed “Ire”), and she soon arrives with bags of groceries to fill the fridge and rekindle her age-old battles with her sibling. It’s not long before we’re treated to the kind of dysfunctional Christmas dinner befitting a dysfunctional family (though the conversation at this one is far more engaging than at yours or mine). Lux proceeds to play the role of the uninvited guest who speaks the truth when others prefer to remain silent. (Think Paulina in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale or Amber in Smith’s earlier novel, The Accidental.)
Winter is not as powerful a novel as Autumn. There’s something more rushed about it that leaves it lacking focus, with a few too many preachy speeches and maybe a little more politics than necessary to make the point. Writing in the The Chicago Tribune, Charles Finch describes it as Smith’s angriest work. I haven’t read enough of her work to judge that, but it clearly has a sharper edge than Autumn.
Winter draws a lot from Shakespeare Cymbeline, which Sophia notes is “about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning. (James Wood writing in The New Yorker calls Winter a postmodern Shakespearean comedy.)
And Lux captures the essence of that when she explains to her hosts why she emigrated to England from her native Croatia:
I read [Cymbeline] and I thought, if this writer from this place can make this mad and bitter mess into this graceful thing it is at the end, where the balance comes back and all the lies are revealed and all the losses are compensated, and that’s the place on earth he comes from, that’s the place that made him, then that’s the place I’m going, I’ll go there, I’ll live there.”
It's a comforting hope, but the way things are going, I fear it will just get Lux deported.
February 11, 2018
Looking for Improvement? Discover Joan Silber
For too long, Joan Silber has labored in the shadows, her work overlooked, underappreciated and read by too few. I’m here to correct that. Or at least give it my best shot.
I just completed her latest novel, Improvement, and it is a stunning work, full of subtlety and insight, conveying an understanding of how ordinary people struggle to make something of their lives. Politicians who want to connect with “real” Americans would have a better chance of doing so if they studied Silber’s work, beginning with Improvement.
Reviews often describe this novel as one of linked short stories, but I don’t think that’s fair. While most of the chapters can stand on their own (and some were published that way), they are more linear and more intertwined than the linked-story novels you may be used to (think Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible or Olive Kitteridge). In Silber’s novel, you have to consider the stories together to appreciate the rich tapestry that Silber has created. The technique is particularly effective in her hands. Each chapter allows her to focus on–and fully explore–a single character, but too much is lost if you don’t consider how those individual lives affect the people around them.
The key character is Reyna, a single mother of a four-year-old, whom we first see as she treks each week from Brooklyn to Rikers Island to see Boyd, a boyfriend who is doing a short jail stint for a minor drug offense. When he gets out, their relationship reignites in every way, but it can’t last, largely because Boyd hangs with the wrong crowd and can’t steer clear of the law. When Reyna is enlisted to help, everything goes wrong, including their relationship.
Then there is Kiki, Reyna’s scolding, sixty-something godmother. Kiki has an interesting backstory that fills a couple of the chapters. As a young woman in the 1970s, she left her family in New York for Turkey and ends up marrying a carpet merchant. They’re happy for a few years, but before long, Kiki gets bored and eventually returns to New York, alone and mostly happy and close by for Reyna.
The novel is alive with other vibrant characters: Darisse, another struggling single mom, works as a home health care aide, kind and tender with her patients despite her troubled personal life. She can’t understand why her greatest love, Claude, stood her up and won’t return her texts and calls. Hers is the kind of world where no one would know to tell her that Claude is dead.
Lynnette, Claude’s sister and closest companion, struggles with her sibling grief, both because of genuine love and because her brother’s death seems to mean the end of her dream to go into business with Claude, who has promised to use his share of the illegal loot to set her up with her own nail salon.
One of my favorite chapters is about Teddy, a 57-year-old truck driver whose guilt over Claude’s death contributes to the end of the affair he’s been having with his ex-wife. Teddy has trouble coming to terms with his role in Claude’s death as well as his role in the death of his first marriage (and maybe the second).
Improvement proves to be the perfect title for this book. It’s the elusive goal that all the characters are striving for, though it takes many forms—domestic, financial, romantic, and professional. Silber is particularly good at exploring her characters’ personal relationships—with all their needs, joys, frustrations, and fulfillments. She often challenges the reader to separate fact from what her characters believe is fact. She drives the challenge home when one character’s life is turned around by an anonymous gift that she wrongly believes comes from an ex-lover. Knowing he’s still keeping an eye out for her welfare powers her personal improvement, even as the reader knows she’s mistaken.
At 72, Silber has written at least three great books, according to Washington Post critic Charles Finch, whose review of Improvement first brought her to my attention. I found Fools, a book of more loosely linked short stories, somewhat uneven, with the stories ranging from superb to just good. Like Fools, the third book mentioned by Finch, Ideas of Heaven, was a finalist for the National Book Award. It’s next up on my list.
I just completed her latest novel, Improvement, and it is a stunning work, full of subtlety and insight, conveying an understanding of how ordinary people struggle to make something of their lives. Politicians who want to connect with “real” Americans would have a better chance of doing so if they studied Silber’s work, beginning with Improvement.
Reviews often describe this novel as one of linked short stories, but I don’t think that’s fair. While most of the chapters can stand on their own (and some were published that way), they are more linear and more intertwined than the linked-story novels you may be used to (think Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible or Olive Kitteridge). In Silber’s novel, you have to consider the stories together to appreciate the rich tapestry that Silber has created. The technique is particularly effective in her hands. Each chapter allows her to focus on–and fully explore–a single character, but too much is lost if you don’t consider how those individual lives affect the people around them.
The key character is Reyna, a single mother of a four-year-old, whom we first see as she treks each week from Brooklyn to Rikers Island to see Boyd, a boyfriend who is doing a short jail stint for a minor drug offense. When he gets out, their relationship reignites in every way, but it can’t last, largely because Boyd hangs with the wrong crowd and can’t steer clear of the law. When Reyna is enlisted to help, everything goes wrong, including their relationship.
Then there is Kiki, Reyna’s scolding, sixty-something godmother. Kiki has an interesting backstory that fills a couple of the chapters. As a young woman in the 1970s, she left her family in New York for Turkey and ends up marrying a carpet merchant. They’re happy for a few years, but before long, Kiki gets bored and eventually returns to New York, alone and mostly happy and close by for Reyna.
The novel is alive with other vibrant characters: Darisse, another struggling single mom, works as a home health care aide, kind and tender with her patients despite her troubled personal life. She can’t understand why her greatest love, Claude, stood her up and won’t return her texts and calls. Hers is the kind of world where no one would know to tell her that Claude is dead.
Lynnette, Claude’s sister and closest companion, struggles with her sibling grief, both because of genuine love and because her brother’s death seems to mean the end of her dream to go into business with Claude, who has promised to use his share of the illegal loot to set her up with her own nail salon.
One of my favorite chapters is about Teddy, a 57-year-old truck driver whose guilt over Claude’s death contributes to the end of the affair he’s been having with his ex-wife. Teddy has trouble coming to terms with his role in Claude’s death as well as his role in the death of his first marriage (and maybe the second).
Improvement proves to be the perfect title for this book. It’s the elusive goal that all the characters are striving for, though it takes many forms—domestic, financial, romantic, and professional. Silber is particularly good at exploring her characters’ personal relationships—with all their needs, joys, frustrations, and fulfillments. She often challenges the reader to separate fact from what her characters believe is fact. She drives the challenge home when one character’s life is turned around by an anonymous gift that she wrongly believes comes from an ex-lover. Knowing he’s still keeping an eye out for her welfare powers her personal improvement, even as the reader knows she’s mistaken.
At 72, Silber has written at least three great books, according to Washington Post critic Charles Finch, whose review of Improvement first brought her to my attention. I found Fools, a book of more loosely linked short stories, somewhat uneven, with the stories ranging from superb to just good. Like Fools, the third book mentioned by Finch, Ideas of Heaven, was a finalist for the National Book Award. It’s next up on my list.
October 27, 2017
Russo's Take on Academia
I don’t normally use this space to review twenty-year-old books, but for Richard Russo, I’ll make an exception. Regular readers know I’m a huge Russo fan. He’s been a big influence on my own writing, and I thought I’d read everything he wrote. But last month a friend recommended one of his novels that I’d missed: Straight Man, published in 1997. It’s the funniest serious novel I’ve ever read.
The narrator, William Henry Devereaux Jr., is heir to a famous name and not much else. He’s a writing professor and temporary chair of the English Department at a third-rank state college in a small fictional town in Pennsylvania. Hank’s father, who looms large throughout the book, was a hugely successful academic and literary critic and a hugely unsuccessful human being. An ice-cold man—at least when (and maybe even when) bedding his female students—Deveraux Sr. walked out when Hank was young and is now poised to return so his ex-wife and son can care for him in his senility.
Hank has plenty of hangups from that childhood, yet he’s chosen to follow in his father’s footsteps, just without the success part. At 29 he wrote his first and only novel, meaningfully titled Off the Road, a book that got good reviews but failed to sell (one of many details in the novel likely to resonate with aspiring authors). Now he’s tenured but trapped, stuck in a nonfunctioning academic world, ruling over an unruly staff of miscreants, and leading a writing workshop for angry and oversexed young adults. (His best advice to one: Always understate necrophilia.)
Russo surrounds Hank with a hilarious, perfectly drawn group of colleagues, almost all of whom have filed grievances against him. There’s Orshee, a nickname resulting from his habit of correcting anyone who uses only the male pronoun; Teddy Barnes, a close friend despite the fact that he’s in love with Hank’s wife; Finny, who claims a PhD from a university whose only asset seems to be a post office box in Texas. And then there’s Gracie, a feminist (and don’t you forget it) poet who hits Hank in the face with a notebook, puncturing his nose with the end of the spiral she’s teased out of place,
Being stuck in this stale and dreary situation and now pushing 50, Hank is in the midst of a midlife crisis he’d rather not recognize, suffering from a bladder problem that is either a kidney stone or cancer or all in his head. The stress is high on every front. The state legislature has slashed the school’s budget and Hank’s faculty revolts over rumors he’s offered up a list of dispensable staff (he’s actually refused to do a list, but he’s too stubborn to deny the rumor). The uproar prompts a vote to yank Hank’s chairmanship, a meeting Hank observes from above—trapped in the ceiling with an uncontrollable urge to pee. The school showdown comes to a head over a long weekend, which also coincides with Hank’s medical crisis, the breakup of his daughter’s marriage, and news that his father is coming back to town. To make matters worse, it just happens to be the weekend that Hank’s wife, the rock in his life, is out of town job hunting. When she leaves, she tells him, “I have this fear. I can’t decide where you’re going to be when I get home. In the hospital or in jail.” In fact, he ends up in both, though only briefly.
As funny as the novel is, it’s deadly serious. Plot is secondary in Russo’s novel, and that is certainly the case here. Instead he focuses on relationships and people and the things that make life what it is. His novels specialize in unmanageable middle-aged men (or, more accurately, men who don’t want to be managed), and he understands them better than anyone. Hank is not quite as complex as Sully, the unforgettable protagonist in Nobody’s Fool and Everybody’s Fool, but he’s a close second. Different, but complex and perfectly drawn. Hank’s relationship with his father is not one I identified with, but many men will, and Russo makes sure I understand it even if I didn’t experience it. That’s Russo at his best. And so is this book.
The narrator, William Henry Devereaux Jr., is heir to a famous name and not much else. He’s a writing professor and temporary chair of the English Department at a third-rank state college in a small fictional town in Pennsylvania. Hank’s father, who looms large throughout the book, was a hugely successful academic and literary critic and a hugely unsuccessful human being. An ice-cold man—at least when (and maybe even when) bedding his female students—Deveraux Sr. walked out when Hank was young and is now poised to return so his ex-wife and son can care for him in his senility.
Hank has plenty of hangups from that childhood, yet he’s chosen to follow in his father’s footsteps, just without the success part. At 29 he wrote his first and only novel, meaningfully titled Off the Road, a book that got good reviews but failed to sell (one of many details in the novel likely to resonate with aspiring authors). Now he’s tenured but trapped, stuck in a nonfunctioning academic world, ruling over an unruly staff of miscreants, and leading a writing workshop for angry and oversexed young adults. (His best advice to one: Always understate necrophilia.)
Russo surrounds Hank with a hilarious, perfectly drawn group of colleagues, almost all of whom have filed grievances against him. There’s Orshee, a nickname resulting from his habit of correcting anyone who uses only the male pronoun; Teddy Barnes, a close friend despite the fact that he’s in love with Hank’s wife; Finny, who claims a PhD from a university whose only asset seems to be a post office box in Texas. And then there’s Gracie, a feminist (and don’t you forget it) poet who hits Hank in the face with a notebook, puncturing his nose with the end of the spiral she’s teased out of place,
Being stuck in this stale and dreary situation and now pushing 50, Hank is in the midst of a midlife crisis he’d rather not recognize, suffering from a bladder problem that is either a kidney stone or cancer or all in his head. The stress is high on every front. The state legislature has slashed the school’s budget and Hank’s faculty revolts over rumors he’s offered up a list of dispensable staff (he’s actually refused to do a list, but he’s too stubborn to deny the rumor). The uproar prompts a vote to yank Hank’s chairmanship, a meeting Hank observes from above—trapped in the ceiling with an uncontrollable urge to pee. The school showdown comes to a head over a long weekend, which also coincides with Hank’s medical crisis, the breakup of his daughter’s marriage, and news that his father is coming back to town. To make matters worse, it just happens to be the weekend that Hank’s wife, the rock in his life, is out of town job hunting. When she leaves, she tells him, “I have this fear. I can’t decide where you’re going to be when I get home. In the hospital or in jail.” In fact, he ends up in both, though only briefly.
As funny as the novel is, it’s deadly serious. Plot is secondary in Russo’s novel, and that is certainly the case here. Instead he focuses on relationships and people and the things that make life what it is. His novels specialize in unmanageable middle-aged men (or, more accurately, men who don’t want to be managed), and he understands them better than anyone. Hank is not quite as complex as Sully, the unforgettable protagonist in Nobody’s Fool and Everybody’s Fool, but he’s a close second. Different, but complex and perfectly drawn. Hank’s relationship with his father is not one I identified with, but many men will, and Russo makes sure I understand it even if I didn’t experience it. That’s Russo at his best. And so is this book.
August 10, 2017
Review: Anything Is Possible
Writing fiction will change the way you read it. I often make a point of reading like a writer (to borrow Francine Prose’s book title), examining what the author is trying to do and how she’s doing it, determining what works and what doesn’t (and why), and looking for how this can help improve my own writing. It doesn’t stop me from reading as a reader—enjoying good literature and losing myself in fictional worlds—but I rarely lose sight of what the author is doing to and for me.
And when I read really good fiction—the kind that strikes a chord deep within—the writer in me usually has two reactions. First, I’m inspired and I want to rush to the computer to try to create a similar gift for my readers. But often the inspiration gets deflated by a feeling that I’m not a real writer, not the kind of author who wields magic—who not only understands people and the world they live in, but also has the tools to effectively convey that.
Such was my reaction to Elizabeth Strout’s new collection of stories, Anything Is Possible.
The book is sort of a sequel to My Name is Lucy Barton, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016. I say, “sort of a sequel” because it’s also part prequel. Its present-day events follow those in the first book, but most of the stories flesh out the early life of Lucy and the characters mentioned in the novel.
The nine linked stories in Anything Is Possible are remarkable on several levels. Strout is a master of both structure and style. Her work is meticulously planned so events and feelings curl around and back to develop seeds planted earlier. And her writing style is both awesome and modest. Elizabeth Day, reviewing Strout’s work in The Guardian, says Strout’s writing “has no ego and the sentences she creates are to serve characters, rather than the author.” That’s exactly right.
Strout’s new collection will undoubtedly remind readers of her hugely successful earlier book, Olive Kitteridge. The similarities in form are obvious, but so too is the focus on providing quiet portraits of ordinary people suffering the disappointments and indignities of everyday life. There is also a similar focus on class. All of the stories in the new book ultimately deal with a question posed by Lucy Barton in the novel, “What is it about someone that makes us despise that person, that makes us feel superior?” Strout’s characters are usually on the receiving end of that question; they’re the despised, not the ones who feel superior, but that’s probably the better angle from which to attack the question.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in “Dottie’s Bed and Breakfast,” the story that most affected me, undoubtedly because a B&B plays a prominent role as the setting of my own novels. Strout does so much more with the setting that it almost made me weep at my own deficiencies, though it also made me realize how much more I can and will try to do in the next one I write.
The action in the story begins with the arrival of new guests:
“…the reservation was made for Mr. and Mrs. Small, and two weeks later a tall—big—white-haired man stepped through the door and said, ‘We have a reservation for Dr. Richard Small.’ Dr. Small’s announcement was apparently large enough to include his wife, who came in right behind him, without any mention of her at all.
“Standing at the front desk, he did the registering with terrible penmanship, irritation oozing out of him, while Mrs. Small—who was very thin and had a look of general nervousness about her—glanced politely around the lounge, and then became interested in the old photographs of the theater that were on the wall, and she seemed to especially like a photograph of the library back in 1940 looking brick-and-ivy old-fashioned, so Dottie had a sense about this woman—and her husband!—right away. Of course, in Dottie’s business she would have a sense about people right away. Sometimes of course Dottie was wrong.”
With the Smalls, Dottie proves right about the husband, less so about the wife, who corners Dottie one afternoon in the lounge and confesses all sorts of personal secrets, only to get angry at Dottie, presumably for having listened. The secrets, which involve disappointments with her marriage and how others view her, don’t surprise or shock Dottie, who “saw Shelly Small as a woman who suffered from the most common complaint of all: Life had simply not been what she thought it would be.”
It is this general disappointment with the hand life has dealt—coupled with a desire to make the most of it anyway—that runs through Strout’s stories and leaves the reader with a better understanding of the struggles we all face. There are few people who better understand these “normal” people than Strout, and even fewer authors who have the ability to tell their stories the way they need to be told. Don’t miss Anything Is Possible.
And when I read really good fiction—the kind that strikes a chord deep within—the writer in me usually has two reactions. First, I’m inspired and I want to rush to the computer to try to create a similar gift for my readers. But often the inspiration gets deflated by a feeling that I’m not a real writer, not the kind of author who wields magic—who not only understands people and the world they live in, but also has the tools to effectively convey that.
Such was my reaction to Elizabeth Strout’s new collection of stories, Anything Is Possible.
The book is sort of a sequel to My Name is Lucy Barton, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016. I say, “sort of a sequel” because it’s also part prequel. Its present-day events follow those in the first book, but most of the stories flesh out the early life of Lucy and the characters mentioned in the novel.
The nine linked stories in Anything Is Possible are remarkable on several levels. Strout is a master of both structure and style. Her work is meticulously planned so events and feelings curl around and back to develop seeds planted earlier. And her writing style is both awesome and modest. Elizabeth Day, reviewing Strout’s work in The Guardian, says Strout’s writing “has no ego and the sentences she creates are to serve characters, rather than the author.” That’s exactly right.
Strout’s new collection will undoubtedly remind readers of her hugely successful earlier book, Olive Kitteridge. The similarities in form are obvious, but so too is the focus on providing quiet portraits of ordinary people suffering the disappointments and indignities of everyday life. There is also a similar focus on class. All of the stories in the new book ultimately deal with a question posed by Lucy Barton in the novel, “What is it about someone that makes us despise that person, that makes us feel superior?” Strout’s characters are usually on the receiving end of that question; they’re the despised, not the ones who feel superior, but that’s probably the better angle from which to attack the question.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in “Dottie’s Bed and Breakfast,” the story that most affected me, undoubtedly because a B&B plays a prominent role as the setting of my own novels. Strout does so much more with the setting that it almost made me weep at my own deficiencies, though it also made me realize how much more I can and will try to do in the next one I write.
The action in the story begins with the arrival of new guests:
“…the reservation was made for Mr. and Mrs. Small, and two weeks later a tall—big—white-haired man stepped through the door and said, ‘We have a reservation for Dr. Richard Small.’ Dr. Small’s announcement was apparently large enough to include his wife, who came in right behind him, without any mention of her at all.
“Standing at the front desk, he did the registering with terrible penmanship, irritation oozing out of him, while Mrs. Small—who was very thin and had a look of general nervousness about her—glanced politely around the lounge, and then became interested in the old photographs of the theater that were on the wall, and she seemed to especially like a photograph of the library back in 1940 looking brick-and-ivy old-fashioned, so Dottie had a sense about this woman—and her husband!—right away. Of course, in Dottie’s business she would have a sense about people right away. Sometimes of course Dottie was wrong.”
With the Smalls, Dottie proves right about the husband, less so about the wife, who corners Dottie one afternoon in the lounge and confesses all sorts of personal secrets, only to get angry at Dottie, presumably for having listened. The secrets, which involve disappointments with her marriage and how others view her, don’t surprise or shock Dottie, who “saw Shelly Small as a woman who suffered from the most common complaint of all: Life had simply not been what she thought it would be.”
It is this general disappointment with the hand life has dealt—coupled with a desire to make the most of it anyway—that runs through Strout’s stories and leaves the reader with a better understanding of the struggles we all face. There are few people who better understand these “normal” people than Strout, and even fewer authors who have the ability to tell their stories the way they need to be told. Don’t miss Anything Is Possible.
June 7, 2017
A Journalist's Life
This is a strange time for journalism—confusing both for the people who practice it and those who consume it. The Trump administration has cast a lifeline to mainstream media like The New York Times and The Washington Post, which have seen circulation surge as old-time investigative reporting kicks into high gear. At the same time, rumors, lies, and complete fabrications get almost equal treatment in certain less reputable media sources, with a huge impact in unfortunate ways. For journalists of the old school (including me) it’s a time of head scratching.
Into this comes Ward Just’s latest novel, The Eastern Shore. Published last November, just as Trump was eking out an Electoral College victory, the novel recounts the life of journalist Ned Ayers, who skips college to become managing editor of the local paper in his tiny hometown of Herman, Indiana, moving up quickly to newspapers in Indianapolis, Chicago, and eventually in Washington, where he works for an unnamed paper that sounds a lot like the Post. Ward Just also worked for the Post, serving as its chief Vietnam correspondent before becoming a novelist in 1969. The world of journalism figures prominently in many of his novels, none more so than The Eastern Shore.
Just uses his protagonist’s experiences to weigh the rewards of journalism (a new experience every day and a chance to influence events) against the burdens (demanding hours that interrupt home life and destroy relationships). In Ned’s case, his commitment—obsession, really—trumps all else, leaving him with a series of relationships that sadly wither and eventually to a lonely retirement on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Although Ned is happy with his life, many readers will see it as the bleak existence of a man who limits himself to the role of observer, never fully a participant in anything. It’s no surprise that when Ned retires and sets out to write his memoir, he finds that he can tell the stories of those he covered, but he has none of his own worth sharing.
The novel is filled with observations about journalism and its long term effects. One of the most riveting examples involves Ned’s first big test at his small-town newspaper. When a reporter discovers that a successful man with a happy family has a dark secret in his past, Ned must help decide whether to publish—whether the value of the truth and the public’s right to know outweighs the personal harm to the individual. He’s forced to confront the fact that journalism too often involves the “discovery of secrets with little attention paid to the consequences” and that the “the first version is always wrong, if only slightly.”
The Eastern Shore is Just’s 19th novel. It is tight and sparing in its prose, much as a good newspaper story should be, and it is remarkable in its ability to make a compelling story about a man who is ultimately unremarkable. The style and singular focus on one man’s life reminded me of John Williams’s Stoner, one of my all-time favorite novels.
I’ve admired Just over his long career, which doesn’t seem to be slowing, even as he approaches his 82nd birthday. The languid pace and lack of action of The Eastern Shore won’t appeal to all readers, but its examination of human character in all its flaws more than makes up for that. The thought-provoking look at journalism is an added plus, a big one.
Into this comes Ward Just’s latest novel, The Eastern Shore. Published last November, just as Trump was eking out an Electoral College victory, the novel recounts the life of journalist Ned Ayers, who skips college to become managing editor of the local paper in his tiny hometown of Herman, Indiana, moving up quickly to newspapers in Indianapolis, Chicago, and eventually in Washington, where he works for an unnamed paper that sounds a lot like the Post. Ward Just also worked for the Post, serving as its chief Vietnam correspondent before becoming a novelist in 1969. The world of journalism figures prominently in many of his novels, none more so than The Eastern Shore.
Just uses his protagonist’s experiences to weigh the rewards of journalism (a new experience every day and a chance to influence events) against the burdens (demanding hours that interrupt home life and destroy relationships). In Ned’s case, his commitment—obsession, really—trumps all else, leaving him with a series of relationships that sadly wither and eventually to a lonely retirement on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Although Ned is happy with his life, many readers will see it as the bleak existence of a man who limits himself to the role of observer, never fully a participant in anything. It’s no surprise that when Ned retires and sets out to write his memoir, he finds that he can tell the stories of those he covered, but he has none of his own worth sharing.
The novel is filled with observations about journalism and its long term effects. One of the most riveting examples involves Ned’s first big test at his small-town newspaper. When a reporter discovers that a successful man with a happy family has a dark secret in his past, Ned must help decide whether to publish—whether the value of the truth and the public’s right to know outweighs the personal harm to the individual. He’s forced to confront the fact that journalism too often involves the “discovery of secrets with little attention paid to the consequences” and that the “the first version is always wrong, if only slightly.”
The Eastern Shore is Just’s 19th novel. It is tight and sparing in its prose, much as a good newspaper story should be, and it is remarkable in its ability to make a compelling story about a man who is ultimately unremarkable. The style and singular focus on one man’s life reminded me of John Williams’s Stoner, one of my all-time favorite novels.
I’ve admired Just over his long career, which doesn’t seem to be slowing, even as he approaches his 82nd birthday. The languid pace and lack of action of The Eastern Shore won’t appeal to all readers, but its examination of human character in all its flaws more than makes up for that. The thought-provoking look at journalism is an added plus, a big one.
