Jan Priddy > Recent Status Updates

Someone should have caught it. At the earliest moment Ida could have known to quote from The Atlantic Monthly and call it The Atlantic, she would have been 88 years old. Editors should be old. I recently found Yoko Ono named in a memoir as "Oko Ono." The error jumped at me. I even researched whether Ono had ever used that abbreviation. Not that I could find. A twenty- or thirty-something might not notice.

It would have been in The Atlantic Monthly that the fictional review appears that Ida quotes.

It is possible that Ida is supposedly writing her memoir after 2003, and therefore knows The Atlantic by that new name rather than The Atlantic Monthly. She would be in her mid-80s, but I suppose it's possible.

I get the conceit: the novel about a power couple, the fictional "autobiography" about them commissioned by the outraged husband, the memoir of the writer of that bio (which is what I'm reading now), and eventually the journal of the wife. I am promised a secret. Do I care in this? I am reminded of what Stegner did to Foote in fictionalizing her life and co-opting entire paragraphs without crediting her publications.

This brings back everything I have lived through and understood about the cruelty and hypocrisy of power.

Gorgeous!

I have begun part 3

I may stop here. The mental illness, which is, apparently a novelistic invention within this novel, about does me in. Time off for good behavior.

Robber barons. This takes me back to my junior year and my research paper on Carnegie. We covered a couple of centuries in that class, but I remember social movement (trade unions, the Triangle Faculty fire, the suffrage movements) more than the wars, other than the smokey demonstration of Revolutionary War white powder. Unfortunately, our current bumbling wanna-be baron lacks any pretense of social responsibility.

I've been avoiding this book for days/

Some cruel, some errors, something else . . . Not liking these much, though they are not bad stories—maybe—just not what I want to be reading just now, you know? The first one I liked was Colwin's story.

I'm sure there must be a name for this style of writing. I've read several books by now that use this magical, other-worldly stream. Lee does it better than the others. There is a reality in her mythical world.

It is a powerful and aching story.

Musical, mysterious, dangerous.

I was attracted immediately because the connection to the Roma.