Lawd Today – Richard Wright

This was Wright’s first novel, written (and worked on) when he was in his middle to late twenties. But it wasn’t published until after his death. And when it did see the light of day (in 1963), the reaction from the critics was mostly negative. The book has flaws a more experienced writer would avoid, the most important being that many scenes go on too long. The graphic language and the raw depiction of sex would have caused it to run into censorship problems in the thirties. Maybe the older Wright felt it wasn’t worth bothering with. As for the critics, I believe they expected a more politically correct approach to the subject of race. Lawd Today covers one day in the life of Jacob Jackson, a post office employee in depression-era Chicago. It begins when he wakes up from a dream of futility and ends when he passes out in a drunken stupor. Wright presents a black man embodying all the stereotypical faults a virulent white racist might assign to him (after waking up Jacob’s first act is to beat his wife, after which he goes through a long ritual of straightening his hair). In the beginning I thought that Wright was having a lot of fun: here’s what you whites think we’re like – violent, dumb, irresponsible, morally deficient. The thing is, Jacobs do exist, and Wright knew this. And even they have valid grievances. I wound up relating to this inglorious man living in a world in which he’s relegated to second (or, in many places, third) class citizenship. The novel flows, it has humor and a freewheeling rambunctiousness, characters come alive (mostly through what they say). The unpolished prose is just right for its subject. We get a taste of Chicago in the thirties, and of the soul-crushing job of a mail sorter (a job that Wright held). There’s a successful kaleidoscopic aspect which may have been borrowed from Dos Passos’s USA trilogy. All in all, my belief is that this novel deserves serious consideration.

Note Found in a Bottle – Susan Cheever

I read this memoir solely because the author was the daughter of a famous author, and the subject was her alcoholism. Susan Cheever has made a cottage industry from her family (books about her father and mother) and her dysfunctional life (another book is about her sex addiction.). Note is short, written simply, and not very interesting. By the end I didn’t think I knew Susan, and I believe the reason is that she doesn’t know herself. Though she presents blunt facts, there’s evasiveness regarding motivation; basically, she believes that her upbringing and her resultant depression made her act in a trashy way. At the end (when she’s in her fifties) she writes that “I live a quiet life now.” Her wild days are behind her. She has found God and sobriety and, I suppose, some moral compass. Also, love of her children. Did I like her and care about her? No. A flat No. There’s something boastful about her sexual exploits, mostly with married men. I don’t find endearing a line like “There were months when I sometimes slept with three men in one day.” (The kids were with a babysitter; and, on one occasion, she notices a lesion on her daughter’s neck – a sign of chicken pox – but she leaves with Raymond for the Riviera Hotel in Cuba anyway). Raymond, the most constant of the many men in her life, comes across as a crazily irresponsible alcoholic (Susan isn’t a crazy alcoholic; she just drinks a lot). The book is saturated with names of Important People. Were they pals of Susan for her personality and talent? I think that all the good things she got in life – jobs, publication – stemmed directly from the fact that she was John Cheever’s daughter. Anyway, the topper comes at the end, with two pages in which she thanks people who helped her. I counted over 130 names, including the likes of Richard Avedon, Cher, Fran Lebowitz, and John Updike. Is this supposed to be a joke? Or is it a sad commentary about fame and success in modern day America?

Growing Up – Russell Baker

I liked this memoir when Russell was a boy, observing others – mainly his mother (his father dies when he’s five), but also an assortment of uncles, aunts and a formidable grandmother. The uncles play a role because the Great Depression is under way, and money is an overriding problem. Although Elizabeth works at a succession of menial jobs she isn’t able financially to have her own home, so she boards with relatives. It’s interesting how open and generous her husband’s family members were in these stressful times; they made room. Not that this is a sugar-coated picture of life; there are problems, a sense of the tragic. We get a uniquely intimate look at the Depression when a successful businessman named Oluf becomes romantically interested in Elizabeth. Baker devotes an entire chapter to Oluf’s letters, and they’re quite touching. He slowly loses all his resources and his initial buoyancy sinks into despair; his final words, after he had asked Elizabeth not to write him anymore, are “I am lost and going and not interested in anything anymore.” So Elizabeth, approaching forty, sees her hopes for love and security vanish. She’s a forceful, determined woman, and places all her ambitions for success on her son (there are two younger daughters, one who is raised by relatives). The first half of the book has powerful writing that evokes emotion through understatement. The problem, for me, was that Russell grows up, and turns from an observer to someone who take an active role in the story. I wasn’t that interested in his school days, his military experiences, his efforts to lose his virginity, his meeting with his future wife. Baker tells about these events in a humorous vein, but he’s not a humorist; he can only play one note, as the hapless loser who somehow succeeds. Though I never disliked Russell, as an adult I just didn’t like him all that much. The mother fades into the background (as she must; he’s a grown man), but her faults seem to become a more pressing issue for Baker. I found the offhand way she’s depicted in the final chapter to be disappointing; I thought she deserved more than he gives her. And I was left wondering if he gave her less than she deserved in life. The thing with memoirs is that the reader passes judgments.

Addenda: I knew that I had read Growing Up before, but I didn’t recall, until minutes ago, that I had written a review of it in 2014. We reach the same conclusions, but arrive at them in different ways. You can decide which version is better. 

Growing Up - Russell Baker

For half the book Baker focuses not on himself but on his family. His father dies at the onset of the Great Depression, and he and his mother are forced to live with various uncles and aunts. The child/young boy’s growing up is depicted in terms of a growth in his understanding of the people around him. Though his indomitable but thwarted mother is the most vivid character, others – such as the hugely generous Uncle Allen and Aunt Pat – are strong presences. Then there’s Oluf, who carried on a courtship with Russell’s mother. In letters he wrote to her we see this lively, enterprising, optimistic man being broken in his struggle to find work. He ends his correspondence with Elizabeth (and disappears from her life) with the words “I am lost and going and not interested in anything anymore.” Baker’s use of these excerpts show him at his unobtrusive best. Unfortunately, the book weakens as he reaches his mid-teens and takes center stage. Teenagers and young men are not very likable creatures, nor are their crises of much interest. Baker assumes an attitude of humorous indulgence (in the case of his difficulty in losing his virginity, he portrays himself as a fumbling rube). But it’s a lumbering type of humor, and the prose – which once could deftly evoke emotions – is no more than what would be expected of a competent journalist.

The Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri
After reading five of the nine stories I was convinced that none of the others would rouse enthusiasm from me. Lahiri is too careful, safe, diligent; the absence of a wayward strain in her work results in a bland, muted quality, and her endings trail off because there’s nothing forceful to build upon. I’m not advocating eye-gouging fiction; but a story that’s dutifully obedient to the rules of good fiction won’t rise to excellence. Another Lahiri shortcoming – a more serious one, but possibly attributable to youth – is evident in the title story, which was the last I read. Early on I was hopeful; it had an engaging premise and its satirizing of two tourists in India was done with an uncustomary zest. But it foundered badly due to the author’s lack of insight into how people think and feel. Would the tour guide become so enamored of the wife (who is depicted as callous and crass) just because she shows a sudden interest in him? Would he fantasize about the two of them leaving their spouses and children and becoming soul mates? Is he fifteen years old? And would she confess the secret of her unfaithfulness to this stranger? We’re asked to believe that his profession – he’s employed by a doctor to interpret the symptoms of Gujarati patients – makes him, in her eyes, qualified to offer “some kind of remedy” for her pain. No, sorry, no basis. To top things off, would adults be so stupid as to allow their children to play with wild monkeys? After some silliness involving sticks and the stamping of feet, the story ends with a textbook moment: the tour guide’s dreams flutter away in the wind. Lahiri’s dreams had a better fate: this debut collection won the Pulitzer Prize.

Black Boy - Richard Wright
On one level this is an exploration of the formation and development of a personalty; on another it’s a study of race relations in the South during the Depression. On both levels it succeeds to a remarkable degree, and that’s because Wright possessed two rare qualities: honesty and perceptiveness. What he has to say – much of it raw and ugly – is shaped by an orderly mind; this is a book with no roadblocks to understanding. In the first half Wright is a small boy, and most of his interactions are with other Blacks. He’s not sympathetic or generous in his depiction of his own race. (I wondered, when I came across a rant at the beginning of Chapter Two, whether certain paragraphs had been censored from the original published version; they contain a sweeping condemnation of the Negro – or, rather, the Southern Negro of the time – and begin with “I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes . . .”). The Negro is ruled by a fear that is almost obsessive; it engenders a deep conservatism, a mentality that says, “You can’t.” When Wright is older and dependent on Whites for jobs, he’s subjected to abuse of such virulence that it’s a jolt to our twenty-first century sensibilities. Wright is constantly on guard, knowing he must conform, must play the role assigned to him or face physical violence, even death. Besides fear, hunger is an unremitting presence in his life. There’s hunger for food (from childhood he never had sufficient food), but as he grows into manhood he develops a hunger for the freedom to be himself and also to be intellectually free. When he’s finally able to get the use of a library card we see the awakening of a famished mind; in novels this isolated young man finds, at long last, others he can relate to. Black Boy reads beautifully; scenes and dialogue come across with immediacy and power, and even minor characters stake out their presence. In an unobtrusive way this book attains the status of an American classic. *

Something of Myself - Rudyard Kipling
This short autobiographical piece was the last thing Kipling wrote. His twisty prose relies on a lot of negatives (a principle “ends not seldom in bloodshed”) and he frames his thoughts in an oblique way (“Thus I often lived alone in the big house, where I commanded by choice native food, as less revolting than meat-cookery, and so added indigestion to my more intimate possessions”). Though initially refreshing, too much of this self-conscious preening became tiresome. Kipling comes across as likable fellow, but as he moves into adulthood he avoids disclosing anything intimate and mostly traces his writing career. Success came easily – from the start there was an audience for his picaresque tales and poems. His receiving the Nobel Prize was probably the worst thing that happened to him, as it led to disparagement of his work. Based on the one story I read, a flaming mess called “The Man Who Would Be King,” the criticism was justified. I think his true domain was as a jingoist and a writer for children. He does manage to end his last book in a striking and dramatic way – by stating that air routes on his globe were “well in use before my death.”