God’s Country – Percival Everett

I usually write reviews of all books I make it at least halfway through, but there was an exception. Here’s an excerpt from an essay I wrote about a year ago, entitled Racism in Fiction: “I’m not writing a review of God’s Country — it’s not worth the effort. Everett is a facile writer, and it seemed to me that he tossed off this piece of crude and abusive nonsense with the primary purpose of expressing his feelings toward the white race.” The reason I’m now referencing it is due to the reception Everett’s recent work has gotten. James has received both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. It’s a reworking of Huckleberry Finn, told from the POV of Jim, the slave. Maybe it’s good. Maybe he’s toned down his feelings. But my local library only has digital versions of the book, and I’m not going to read it off a screen. And I’m not going to buy it.

You can read the essay dealing with God’s Country at Racism in Fiction

The Mangan Inheritance – Brian Moore

Moore should get credit for his clear, smooth prose, which carries the reader along effortlessly. I was carried along effortlessly in the first part, when Jamie Mangan was living in New York, married to a woman who had become a star of stage and screen. And who ditches him for a producer. But before her divorce, she gets into a fatal car accident, and Jamie winds up the sole heir to a lot of money. That’s only one inheritance in this novel. The other one (or at least the possibility of one) is discovered by Jamie while staying with his father. He comes across an old daguerreotype and is startled: he could be looking at the image of himself. The man photographed just might be the famous (and famously dissolute) 19^th century Irish poet, James Clarence Mangan. Jamie, in his younger days, had fashioned himself as a poet; that ambition had fizzled, but is now revived: could the poet’s blood of his ancestor flow in his veins? So off he goes to Ireland, to a remote and dismal village where some Mangans live. They’re a ragtag and mysterious group (they seem to be hiding some secret). Jamie is immediately smitten by a teenage vamp, and Moore serves up an explicit sex scene. Which I wished he had spared me. Actually, I had fallen out of sympathy with the proceedings. I had the feeling of being mired down in an Irish bog. I just didn’t care about Jamie’s search. I didn’t care if he was an ancestor of JCM, I didn’t care if he would start writing poetry again. If, indeed, that was where Moore was headed. But I didn’t care where he was headed. 

Open Secrets – Alice Munro

Munro won the Nobel Prize, so learned studies of her work will be coming out. I’m going to make some generalizations about this collection, which was an early mid-career work, and came out just before A Friend of My Youth. I read that book and thought it had three very good stories, but in my review I wrote that most were “baggy, unfocused and too long.” All those problems were endemic in this collection. By “baggy” I’m referring to the many loose ends left hanging about. And too many characters appear but play no real role; they amount to clutter. That’s part of being “unfocused,” a problem that also arises from the way Munro shifts about in time. We go back and forth, we skip over years (decades!). Munro doesn’t focus on a limited scale; it’s as if she wants to write a novel that covers an entire life (which helps to make the stories “too long”). And where are we left at the end? Often in a sort of limbo. The last story in the collection, and the last one I read (I skipped “The Albanian Virgin”) was “Vandals.” It begins with a letter (almost every story has letters, some quite long) and then we go back to when Bea meets Ladner and falls in love. (Is it love?; I guess so.) He’s a strange duck, but interesting. Then we switch to present time, to two other characters, Liza and her husband Warren, both young. Liza lives near the Ladner home (Ladner had died), and Bea writes a letter asking them to check on the house where Ladner (and, later, she) had lived. What Liza does is gleefully and maliciously trash the entire place (initially Warren watches, seemingly unconcerned, but later joins in). They plan to blame the destruction on vandals. Why does Liza do this – act like a maniac? Something seems to have happened between her and Ladner when she was very young. We get gauzy flashback images suggesting that. But what? Molestation? My reaction? – Alice, spit it out. Quit with the vagueness. I don’t need any explicit description, but I do need more than hints. In this collection the most concise story is “The Jack Randa Hotel,” which also has a definite ending. But I can’t say it’s the best, because I didn’t think it was anything special. Is Munro a talented writer? Yes, absolutely – I enjoyed parts, even whole sections, of every story. And some of her stories I’ve read in the past have worked entirely. But none in this collection achieved success, for the reasons I’ve given. In fact, dissatisfaction set in, which is why I skipped “Virgin.” I just had my fill of disorderly storytelling. Final note: I checked Goodreads reviews, and a two star review was brief but, I believe, makes a good summary: “I’m still not quite sure what did and didn’t happen in this book.” Same with me, bro.

A Patchwork Planet – Anne Tyler

I found this novel to be enjoyable and satisfying. Barnaby, the main character, came to life, as did the secondary ones. I pretty much liked everybody (with the exception of a few, but they were jerks). And if there’s a point being made about Life, it’s in Barnaby’s interactions with his clients at Rent-a-Back. That business provides assistance to those who need it – which is, mostly, the elderly. Clean out an attic, get a prescription, move a sofa, fix a leaky faucet. All manner of little and not-so-little jobs and errands. In some cases, he’s just providing human contact (under a flimsy premise). We get a look at old age that is, I believe, accurate and meaningful. Barnaby is invariably patient and caring (though not in a gushy way). He has an innate decency. But why is he, at age thirty, working for meager wages at such a low-level job? Couldn’t an intelligent guy do better? It all has to do with a misspent youth, which he never rises above. He never “gets his act together.” Some might classify him as a loser, but I didn’t. Maybe he found his calling at Rent-a-Back. As for Tyler’s plot, it has its strengths and its weaknesses, but the weaknesses weren’t deal-breakers. That said, I must admit that I felt sorry for what happens to Sophia at the end. She’s the thirty-five-year-old woman Barnaby gets romantically involved with. I don’t believe her mistake in judgement was so bad. But my having this opinion stems from that virtue of the novel I mentioned: I liked the lady. Last note, pertaining to that Goodreads reader who, in reading the Munros stories I reviewed above, was “not quite sure what did and didn’t happen.” Try Tyler. You won’t run into that problem.

Living - Henry Green
In my review of Green’s Loving I wrote, regarding the prose, “I don’t think Green tried; he was transcribing onto the page the way he thought.” This novel, written sixteen years before Loving, shows that it took effort to develop his style; Living is not as polished a work as the later book. The stretches in which nebulous states are described don’t quite come off, nor does the dropping of articles (“This girl Lily Gates went shopping with basket and by fruiterer’s she met Mrs. Eames who stood to watch potatoes on trestle table there”). What is present in both books is an ability to use dialogue so successfully that characters attain a palpability. Another quality that was fully developed – a quality that was Green’s gift – was his empathy. It’s interesting that though he was born into a wealthy family, he chose to focus on the working class. I think he felt (without a trace of condescension) that they were closer to life’s vital essence. In Living there are many characters, many voices, and for a long while the novel doesn’t settle on any particular individual; it seems to wander about. Which was fine in that we get a sense of diversity. But gradually most of the attention is given to Mr Craigan and Lily Gates. Mr Craigan is elderly; his being sacked from the foundry because of age marks the beginning of his decline. To work – something he had done for fifty-seven years, since he was eight – was an essential part of his being. Lily Gates is a young woman who feels an inchoate need to live, which to her means to care for a child of her own and to keep house for a man she loves. We have two intertwined lives at opposite stages; it’s the intertwining that presents a conflict for both. In a sudden and wondrous ending it’s clear that life must have its way. *

Too Much Happiness - Alice Munro
I was glad that Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize. Over the decades she’s been a chronicler of life whose work often rose to the level of four star excellence. But in this collection, which came out in 2009, only three stories can be called good; most of the others were fair, some were bad. How could Munro write something as awkward and foolish as “Wenlock Edge”? “Child’s Play” is another mistake; it’s revealed on the last pages that a murder had been committed, but instead of having force – something which Munro was uniquely capable of – this ending seemed contrived and lame. As for the title story, I read only five pages; it had too many characters, too many locations, too much research cluttering things up; and by the time I got to it I had lost faith. Munro, who was in her late seventies when Happiness came out, recently announced that she had given up writing. Could she be aware of a decline in her abilities? It’s hard to relinquish something that has been an integral part of your life for so long, but what’s the alternative? To just go through the motions? The last story I read by Munro (before the ones in this collection) was a stunner called “Silence.” That, and a dozen others like it, are what I’ll remember her for.

Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott
An oddity, a diversion. In the beginning Abbott describes how life is structured in the world of Flatland, where people exist without the dimension of height. They are two-dimensional shapes: Lines, Triangles, Squares (which is what the narrator is), Hexagons, etc. Their status in society is defined by the number and the degree of pointedness of their angles. Polygonals, which can hardly be distinguished from circles, are the highest class. All Lines are female; they’re stupid, very emotional and dangerous (the sharp point of their lines can inflict a mortal wound when they start thrashing about). Abbott is making a humorous commentary on class discrimination, the status of women in Victorian England, and – since the punishments for nonconformity in Flatland are extremely harsh – he depicts a brutish totalitarian state. In the second part of the book (which I found less engaging), the narrator discovers, to his amazement, a three-dimensional world like ours, and he contemplates the possibility of there being even more dimensions. Abbott’s message is that we need to keep our minds open to possibilities; what we know, based on our perceptions and what we’re taught, may not be the whole story. This book itself was flat – eighty pages long – which was about the right size.

The Silent Cry - Kenzaburo Oe (Japanese)

A huge letdown after A Personal Matter. Doubts set in at the halfway mark and were fully confirmed at the end. The book is over-populated, over-written, over-plotted. There’s much agonizing, and Oe constantly leads the reader to believe that profound revelations will be revealed. They never materialize. What we get is pretentious, awkward, false in its portrayal of human nature. And, worst of all, foolish.

Friend of My Youth - Alice Munro

Many of these stories meander around the emotions of women; they’re baggy, unfocused and too long. Munro experiments, goes through stages, and this was one of her stages. Despite being baggy and unfocused and long, “Wigtime” and “Differently” succeed in part because the characters and situations are engrossing; but it’s the muted mood of melancholy suffusing these stories that give them resonance. “Pictures of the Ice” is the most straightforward piece (which is the approach Munro should stick to). It begins with an enigmatic premise; the ending resolves the enigma perfectly. Three very good ones.

Warlock - Oakley Hall

Hall takes the stereotypes of the wild west – characters and situations we’re overly familiar with – and deepens them, gives them complexity. The real humans behind the stereotypes emerge. Hall is concerned with moral choices, difficult ones; the west of the 1800s provides an ideal backdrop to explore right and wrong. This is a long book, with many characters, many plot threads; it provokes thought and at times it surprises – but the changes people go through are convincing. At the novel’s core is Johnny Gannon, a man engaged in a lonely struggle with himself – a struggle that I became intimately involved in. *

 

Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe

Achebe wrote Anthills more than twenty years after his previous novel, and he had clearly lost it. Lost what? – his ability to write well or his desire to do so? The book is sloppy in both its construction and the prose; the characters are wooden and unconvincing. What pervades this undertaking is a sourness. The sourness is justified (Achebe was writing about the politics of Africa), but he presented his story artlessly. I stopped reading at the halfway point.

The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro
In this collection Munro is at her near-best, which is formidable. Her perspective is from the tail end of middle-age. Sometimes she looks back at childhood and parents; sometimes she looks ahead at old age. With both these subjects she does her strongest work. (My favorite story, “Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd,” takes place in a nursing home.) The weakest ones, for me, were about women in their late forties who are caught up in fervent sexual relationships. Their desperation and neediness made me uncomfortable; they’re abject before men who consume their entire being. The men are similar: unprepossessing fellows with a knack for attracting women and then dropping them. Disappointment and loss and death are present in many of these stories. But Munro is a chronicler of life, and the stage she’s exploring in this collection is a difficult one.

Solomon Gursky Was Here - Mordecai Richler
I stopped after reading over 300 pages. This is an ambitious novel, and the author has a great deal of talent. But the talent is given too free a rein. So many, many characters, so many, many plot strands! Each done well, but never coalescing into a coherent whole. Everybody and everything is extreme, overly-colorful. A richness on this scale has to be controlled because it wears the reader down – especially when the reason to be reading this stuff becomes more and more tenuous. Here I am at page 300, and I’m in a bog. Then I went into full critical mode: Why so much raunchiness, and why did Richler (a Jew) cook up such a rotten bunch of Jews? This book became offensive to me.

The Company She Keeps - Mary McCarthy
This is supposed to be a novel, but it’s a group of short stories. No engaging or distinct personalities emerge. This is one of McCarthy’s shortcomings. She can be overly analytical, like a scientist examining human specimens (and sometimes dissecting them). Her writing/dissection is done with such thoroughness that it’s tedious to read her when she’s in this mode. When she cared about her characters (not loved them; just cared) – as in The Groves of Academe or A Charmed Life – her intelligence was used to good purpose.

First Love and Other Stories - Samuel Beckett (French)
Recently I tried Murphy again, and again quit after four or five pages. For me, Beckett is unreadable. I get lost in words that are only vaguely connected to a world I can relate to. Every once in a while some situation or image or personality or feeling will come floating along, and I grasp at it (desperately) but it slips away, and I’m again lost.