Americana – Don Delillo
This was Delillo’s debut novel, and his prose crackles with intelligence and originality. Dave, the first person narrator, is a young executive at a television network. In a manic chapter (the Friday review meeting) he observes people like Weede Denney and Reeves Chubb engage in an absurdist charade of mendaciousness and ineptitude and toadying. When he’s not killing time in his office Dave navigates through New York as if he owned it – he seems to know everyone and has beautiful women at his beck and call. Yet he feels a profound desolation and solitude. And there’s the killer. This might have worked as a satire of corporate life, for it’s funny in parts and has a fast-moving surface sheen good for skating on. But with a protagonist suffering from angst that potential melted away. Especially when the angst comes across as a contrivance. In Part Two we take an excursion into Dave’s youth, but he’s no different from the adult version: one cool customer with hidden depths. After leaving a party rife with inanity (Dave gets off some of his trademark quips) he stands outside in the dark and quiet and thinks, “It was a Sunday night in early September, and my body beat with sorrow at the beauty and mockery of all bodies.” Shortly thereafter, as Dave was shagging fly balls at a deserted ballpark, I decided to part company with him. So I missed his cross-country trip, in which, according to the back cover, he makes a “mad and moving attempt to capture a sense of his own and his country’s past, present and future.”

The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
The first person narrator in Morrison’s debut novel is ten-year-old Claudia; the book seems to be about her and her sister. Pecola appears as a secondary character, a poor soul who has everything going against her. But Pecola’s story begins to take up more space; we even get the life histories of her parents. At the close of the chapter devoted to her father he rapes Pecola. What follows next is a chapter featuring Soaphead Church, who has a thriving business as a Spiritualist and Psychic Reader. Pecola comes to him, asking for blue eyes (so that she can be beautiful, like white people). Soaphead rents an apartment from a lady whose mangy old dog revolts him; he gives Pecola some poisoned meat and tells her to feed it to the dog, and “if the animal behaves strangely, your wish will be granted on the day following this one.” The dog dies horribly and Soaphead goes to his desk and writes a long, instructive letter to God, much of it justifying his sexual desire for little girls. Pecola gets her wish; we learn this in a chapter in which she’s talking obsessively about her blue eyes to an imaginary friend; she’s gone over the edge. In an Afterword Morrison expands on the genesis of the novel and its broader theme (racial self-loathing). Though she wanted readers to interrogate themselves for the smashing of Pecola, many “remain touched but not moved.” Beyond my “poor soul” reaction, I was both unmoved and untouched. The fault lies primarily in the way Pecola is presented. She mostly appears in disconnected segments in which she’s observed by others; this placing her on the sidelines amounts to an avoidance of her. Other elements detracted from believability, foremost of which was the over-the-top garishness (the Soaphead chapter is an example). And the degree of ugliness was alienating. Some people get more than their rightful share of it, but to express it so graphically made me feel as if it were being shoved in my face (here’s the Truth, like it or not). Lastly, Morrison’s attempt to impose newness through typography stuck me as gimmicky. We get chapters in which the margins aren’t justified; we get sections in italics; chapters begin with excerpts from a white child’s reader: HEREISTHEFAMILYMOTHERFATHERDICKANDJANE . . . Morrison ends her Afterword by writing that “the initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola’s life: dismissed, trivialized, misread. And it has taken twenty-five years to gain for her the respectful publication this edition is.” Morrison’s Nobel Prize was surely the deciding factor in the republication. As for the belated respect, Morrison deserves credit for her intentions.

Seven Poor Men of Sydney – Christina Stead
In Stead’s debut novel (I’ve been using those last two words a lot lately) she lets her prodigious talent run unchecked. Her characters are speaking machines, going on and on in a manner so rarefied, so hyper-intelligent that it was difficult to follow. No discernible plot emerged – just a lot of socialism and unhappiness – and the emotions were pitched way too high. Finally, two thirds of the way through, the tidal wave of words began washing over me, and I quit reading. There were stretches in Poor Men when the weight of words and ideas was lifted, when people interacted, and these interludes were wonderful; they’re better than what most authors are capable of. Though Stead would always remain an undisciplined writer, she would learn some things about her craft. In The Man Who Loved Children we get an entire novel that is wonderful.

The Violent Land – Jorge Amado (Portuguese)
The violence is between two “colonels” (plantation owners) vying for a tract of virgin forest on which they can cultivate the highly profitable cocoa tree. The action takes place in the early 1900s in Amado’s native Brazil. In his introduction to the 1965 edition, he describes the cocoa colonels as “indomitable, titanic men of unlimited courage, for whom life had no value.” But are there such men? Emotions in this book (everyone’s, not just those of the titans) are outsized; anger is deadly, love is wildly passionate. Amado attempted to write a saga chronicling the origin of a land that was “fertilized with human blood.” His story clearly moved him; but the garish, over-the-top quality kept me at arm’s length, and I remained merely entertained. His scope, being so broad and including so diverse a cast, proved to be unwieldy, and at the end even major figures are left unaccounted for. I wondered what happened to Sinho Badera. But it was curiosity that I felt, nothing more, and it soon passed.

God Help the Child – Toni Morrison
It was a huge mistake for this eighty-four-year-old Nobel Prize winner to attempt a novel that was set in the present day hip culture. It’s about serious matters, but the synthetic characters and silly plot combine to make it cartoonish. Bride is a “midnight black” woman who becomes wealthy as the originator of a line of cosmetics called YOU, GIRL. She uses her blackness (which is what her light-skinned mother rejected her for) to become a much-desired “panther in snow.” Bride drives a Jaguar and wears boots of brushed rabbit fur. Her “friend” at the billion dollar firm of Sylvia, Inc is named Brooklyn (sample dialogue: “The dude splits, you feel like cow flop, you try to get your mojo back, but it’s bust, right?”). The dude in question is the enigmatic Booker; they meet while Bride is dancing in a packed stadium and someone puts his arms around her waist: “Then his hands are on my stomach and I am dropping mine to hold onto his while we dance front to back. When the music stops I turn around to look at him. He smiles. I am moist and shivering.” Booker turns out to be more than a dynamite lover; he’s deep, and he splits with the words “You not the woman I want.” She finds some things he left, including a shaving brush, which she use to fondle herself. Had enough? Well, okay, a woman by the name of Sofia is released from prison after serving twenty years as a child molester; Bride follows her to a motel; she knocks on the door and presents Sofia with a Louis Vuitton shopping bag containing five thousand dollars in cash, a three thousand dollar Continental Airlines gift certificate, and a box of YOU, GIRL products. When suspicious Sofia learns Bride’s real name, she proceeds to beat the crap out of her. Sprawling on the street with her gifts scattered around her, Bride calls Brooklyn instead of the police because, in her disfigured state, she would go in the public eye from “YOU, GIRL to BOO, GIRL.” Had enough? No? Okay. Bride, trying to find Booker, is driving her Jag at night on a curving mountain road and “trusts to her high-beam headlights and accelerates,” promptly crashing into a tree. A child named Raisin finds her, and her father and mother make room for Bride (her ankle is broken) in their humble abode; they’re aging white hippies, and sometimes they sit outside at night, strumming a guitar and singing songs: “This land is your land, this land is my land . . .” See, they don’t have a TV. But you do, girl, and I suggest you turn it on and watch some junky show. Because even if you haven’t had enough of this nonsense, I can’t provide any more because I stopped reading at this point.

Mulliner Nights – P. G. Wodehouse
Wodehouse is known mainly for creating two characters, the butler Jeeves and his master Bertie Wooster. I could never rouse interest in this duo. But Nights is a collection of stories told by Mr. Mulliner over drinks in an English pub. I gave it a try, and now I can understand Wodehouse’s appeal; he delivers light, enjoyable fare, he has a deft touch with humor, and his prose flows with a pleasurable smoothness. Mr. Mulliner’s tales are about some male relative, often a nephew, and most involve the efforts of the young man to gain a girl’s hand in marriage (the obstacle is commonly her formidable and disapproving father). Wodehouse knew where his talent lay, and he knew what his audience wanted. He produced close to a hundred novels, and I’ll wager that in none of them did he get serious or make any sort of demands on the reader. He wrote diversions, nothing more. That said, his diversions were intelligent ones; even when absurdity sets in, which it often does, it’s not the dumb type. Is Wodehouse a writer I’ll turn to in the future? No, but I don’t regret the evenings I spent in Anglers’ Rest.