FBR 93: Dots and Dashes . . .

Inaugurating a new column of Friday Book Report with "Dots and Dashes," an occasional eclectic look at the microcosm of the book world swirling across my desk.

This past week received and read Chris Lynch's marvelous new novel, Angry Young Man. It's an often harrowing story of two brothers, one of whom is a kind of misfit while the other is a sort of bully. You love them both, they love each other, but we watch in pain as they drift away, flail, and veer toward violence. Lynch's prose is spare and muscled. Brothers will recognize the troubled relationship and know it comes from life.

Am nearing the end of Paul Alexander's Salinger: A Biography (1999), purchased after Jay McInerney plugged it in his New York Times Book Review piece about the new bio, J.D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski, which I haven't started yet. Both books are short, because, after the 1965 publication of Salinger's most recent story, there isn't much to tell: Lived in woods. Hated everything else. The Alexander book is solid, if not as compelling as what Blake Bailey might have made of the story, but there were some funny moments for me. Not funny Ha-Ha. I wondered if my father ever read him. Or knew that their paths may have crossed. Salinger was in the infantry in the D-Day invasion, priorly stationed in England, as my father, a paratrooper was. Sure, I know, there were tens of thousands of guys there. But later, Salinger was part of the group that liberated Cherbourg where and when my father, wounded and taken to a German prisoner of war hospital, was being held. Will likely never know.

Salinger's New Yorker stories are fine and stand up. I've never been able to get much beyond the first page of Catcher; that voice is so grating. But I will try it again, probably, after I get through the Slawenski.

Speaking of short stories, read the title story of ZZ Packer's debut collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, mostly because as I was skimming it I saw that it was set at Yale (she is a graduate). Would like to someday teach this story as an example of how one is crafted. It may show the youth of its author, but is well done, well written, and would hold up under examination. Researching ZZ, I understand that this is her only book. Want to see more of her writing. Want to see a novel. A short one. ZZ, write one now, thank you.

Two other books of note can't wait to start: Harlem is Nowhere by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, the kind of book I love, a wide-ranging, personal meditation on the culture of a specific time and place. The title, of course, is from Ellison. And Townie, a memoir, just out, from Andre Dubus III. I heard him read a portion of this a couple of years ago, from a high pulpit in one of the old churches in Newburyport and knew instantly that I wanted to read on paper what he read out to us, a story about his growing up poor and weak in a depressed Massachusetts mill town. This, while having a famous writer for a father. Townie is that book.