A Literary Life

All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy)

As most people who have talked to me about books in the last year know, I love The Road. I’ve often said so with a sigh in my voice and a twinkle in my eye, because despite the seriousness of the subject matter, I fell in love. That novel made me feel as if I was discovering something for the first time: a talent, a voice, a world, an ever-present human story only now articulated.

But I’m self-aggrandizing, I know. The sharp, artful voice and aching melancholy of Cormac McCarthy has been there since he set pen to page, continued to be there as he won the National Book Award and wasn’t discovered when MY eyes met his words. All the Pretty Horses, written in 1992, proves that. However, I can’t help but feel again that I have stumbled upon something momentous, something meant just for me in a small way, something beautiful that will make my eyes twinkle and my voice sigh when I try to convey just how remarkable an accomplishment All the Pretty Horses is.

But McCarthy describes that startling feeling of discovery better than me in his stark, biting dialog.

“I never knowed there was such a place as this.
I guess there’s probably every kind of place you can think of.
Rawlins nodded. I wouldn’t have thought of this one, he said.”

In this case, the two main characters — teenagers from Texas ranches who travel into Mexico looking for work as cowboys — have found a level of pain and misery and degradation previously unimaginable. Their coming-of-age trek has been blown off course by the harsh desert wind, slapped about by the hand of fate, which knocks out of them the idea that they’re entitled success, happiness, even life. It all begins with a chance meeting with a younger stranger who claims his name is Blevins, and that one chance snowballs through love, talent, destiny, friendship, hope and crushing loss until we wind up in a place that’s brutal and bloody yet truthful.

And somehow beautiful:

“He picked out the smallest doe among them and shot her … The sky was dark and a cold wind ran through the bajada and in the dying light a cold blue cast had turned the doe’s eyes to but one thing more of the things she lay among in the darkening landscape. Grass and blood. Blood and stone. Stone and dark medallions that the first flat drops of rain caused upon them. He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

Only McCarthy could explain to me this masculine strength and honor and adventure so deftly, me! Who usually shies away from Westerns and is allergic to horses. Even I can see how the stark lines (and again, stark prose) of the landscape and of these characters’ lives are somehow more telling, more primal than every flowery, curl-i-que tale. The latter rely on embellishment and literary trickery to establish depth. Whereas the pure, beautiful depth of McCarthy’s work aches in your bones and raises goosebumps on your skin.

I’m afraid to say there’s going to be lots more Cormac McCarthy on my plate and on my bookshelves in the future. Anyone know which one I should tackle next?

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hardcover

Bridge of Sighs (Richard Russo)

You know, the last time I read Russo, it was the perfect medicine for my situation — bored and a little lonely, whiling away time while The Boyfriend was out of town. And though I bought this book late last year, it was a happy day when that ever-roaming Boyfriend left town and I found I could again comfort myself with a little Richard Russo. No, I don’t find him inspiring or cutting edge or even incredibly unique. But the man is an excellent sculptor of character and a master of simple story telling.

Bridge of Sighs, again, was not surprising or unique. In fact, parts are a bit repetitive of his previous books (another textile mill town?) and of the tried-and-true plot lines of many other authors (love triangles, odd-man-out moments, pressures to follow/rebel against family ways, etc.). But Russo really takes the time to introduce the reader to the people — the REAL people — of his tale. He gives them pasts, futures, secret dreams, idiosyncrasies, talents, faults. The words that come out of their mouths ring of truth, as if it wouldn’t be possible for that particular character to say or do anything else in that particular moment in time. And I find this getting-to-know-you dance with the characters so comforting. You can sit back, kick up your feet and just let these people wash over you.

Same, too, with the plot. It meanders along toward a conclusion that, yes, probably could have been guessed, at least most of it. But it has a feeling of inevitability, like gravity pulling a stream downhill. There will be no eye-brow furrowing moments of complexity, no enigmatic word play, no meta-fiction farces like jumps in time or point of view. It’s just a straight-forward story. There is pain and loss, of course, as in any story, and those are emotional moments. But the reader comes to terms with it as the characters do, led along by the patient explanations and logical justifications of the author. In other words, everything happens for a reason, a reason that will be pondered and put into context by the characters in the story — unlike in real life, where shit happens for absolutely no reason at all and there is no omniscient narrator to help you make sense of it. The characters do the real heavy lifting, and the reader is along for the ride.

Hey, I love good eyebrow-furrowing plots, meta farces and enigma as much as the next person. Actually, I love it, probably more than most. But books like this are a balm on occasion, a welcome respite during which you can trust you’re in the hands of a master story teller, one that wouldn’t lead you wrong.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection

Intuition (Allegra Goodman)

I read Allegra Goodman before (see Kaaterskill Falls) and I rated that freshman effort a 2.5 out of 5 stars. And I think I was as impressed with her mediocrity last time as I was this go-around. I can just see this woman, who I know — I can TELL — is an intelligent, thoughtful human being standing in a room, looking out a window, casting around for something to write her next book about. Terminal disease? No. Love? No. Nuclear holocaust? No. Then she picks up a Scientific American and says, Yes! Biomedical ethics! That’s best-selling shit, for sure.

And she would have been right. It was best-selling. It just wasn’t good. Not inspired in the least. Characters I got to know but not care about who did things that I could have predicted in the first 100 pages. Worse, the narrator goes off for paragraphs about these characters perfectly obvious thoughts: He was an ambitious man. She felt jilted. Really? I kind of intuited that from the fact that he was a cancer researcher hoping his experiment is publishable and she just got dumped. It doesn’t take a genius, people.

But worst of all, there on almost every page is one of my biggest, most bitched-about pet peeves in writing EVER: an omniscient narrator that switches between the characters heads, knowing all of their intimate thoughts, all at once. In this case, she could often switch brains three times on one page and I wanted to scream: My god, woman! You might as well type  “I am taking the easy way out of telling a story” on your keyboard. Lazy, uninspired woman. Wait, did I say uninspired already? I did? Well, she deserves it twice.

Come back to me Allegra, darling, when you have something that has grabbed your heart to write about, something that springs from deep in your brain that is genuinely yours, that teaches me something about the world that I didn’t know or hadn’t seen in that way before. Don’t give me words and actions to fill up a page and create a plot arc. Give me a hearty meal instead of fast food. Again, you seem like a very intelligent woman with a good grasp of the written word. Just a little genuine inspiration (there’s that word again) might do the trick. Of course, I’m a little blocked myself at the moment, so perhaps we could spread it around, yes?

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading

Anansi Boys (Neil Gaiman)

Silly but entertaining book about the sons of the trickster god Anansi and how they come into their powers, steal each others girlfriends and learn not to be scared of karaoke.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars - Mediocre vacation reading

Empire Falls (Richard Russo)

So a lot of time has gone by since I read this book, time full of a lot of shit and — at the same time — a lot of nothing. But suffice it to say that I haven’t had the mental energy to catalog my reading material lately. Because of the time gone by and my energy level, then, I will keep this brief.

I was recommended this book by co-workers, who enjoyed it, and I have to say I enjoyed it, too. Russo chronicles the story of a small town, once thriving thanks to a local textile factory owned by a local Kennedy-like “royal” family, but now shrinking and shabby due to the factory’s closure. We follow the lives of the “royal” family, the family of the man who runs the local diner and others in their everyday quest for, well, happiness. Basically, it’s a family- or town-based epic story, but without the simplicity and plot-driven characteristics of such stories. Every character is unique and carefully wrought, every plot point character-driven and interesting (despite the entrance of some hot-button issue twists, which I won’t reveal for those who want to read the book).

It was a fun book, one that read easily but without condescending to the reader, an absorbing book that took me away to a world just as complicated as my own, but more interesting. I suppose it took me to the place I needed to be when so much (and yet so little) was going on — a REAL place with REAL people who lent insight into the REAL world that I live in.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection

Good Omens (Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett)

There is nothing more fascinating about the universe than its prophesied end. Well, except sex, good motion pictures and (some would say) American football, perhaps. Even so, the doom and gloom of the Apocalypse has captivated humanity as long as there’s been humans to contemplate how they were created, the point of life and how it would probably end in a fiery ball of misery. (I know, we humans are so cheerful and optimistic with our four horsemen, showers of frogs and flaming wormwood, aren’t we?) In this satirical play on Apocalyptic myth and prediction, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett turn “end times” legends on their head with large doses of humor and blasphemous fun.

In the beginning, there was God and the angels, and after a great “falling” out came the devil and his demons. Both the forces of good and evil twiddled their thumbs and played a cosmic game of chess (or, why not, Chutes and Ladders) with the human race, biding their time until the ultimate showdown, throw down, last-man-standing-takes-all war to destroy the planet God once created. But a lot of time passed between then and now. Humans grew up, finding their own ways towards both good and evil. And the minions of both forces spent time on Earth, finding that they actually liked these flawed, strange, willful beings, and didn’t so much see the point of blowing the whole thing up to settle some existential, cosmic bet made millennium before. Oh, and the anti-Christ is delivered to humanity, but to the wrong family, and becomes better at leading games of cowboys and indians in the forest rather than the forces of evil.

Reminiscent of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in tone, the book is also similar in complexity: the characters are over-blown and simple, though entertaining, the plot humorous but predictable, and the theme obvious. Obvious in that, well, it’s written by humans, modern humans who cherish our failings and see they could be strengths, secular humans who believe more in science than the wormwood predictions of a dusty, antiquated Bible. But hey! I liked Hitchhikers, and I liked this book, too. I’m simply saying that everything in the book will entertain, nothing will surprise, and that is the ultimate in…

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading

Black Swan Green (David Mitchell)

Mitchell wrote Cloud Atlas, which absolutely entranced — if also slightly confused — me, and Black Swan Green is his latest novel. However, it is hard at first glance to recognize the one author in the two extremely different works. The Cloud Atlas skipped through time with multiple, unconnected narrators, and Black Swan Green focuses around one character over a very specific space of time, specific in the boy’s life and specific to one historical time period — the 1980s in England. The first was quite post-modern, like an abstract painting the viewer needs time and experience to digest, and the other is a traditional landscape, simple and obviously lovely, one of many coming-of-age tales, a repeat of an oft-done genre of fiction.

Yet, if you look at the language, Mitchell is still present in this later work. His language and the vivid, unique and personal descriptions of interior emotion are still there. The skill is there and undeniable. In truth, Mitchell is perhaps more present personally in this tale than in the previous. I kept getting the sneaking suspicion that this is his childhood we are romping through, his generation’s music we are bombarded with, his youthful slang. It seemed to be the semi-autobiographical story he always yearned to write and now could thanks to his recent critical and commercial successes.

An author being close to their work is usually a good thing. Yet there is a point where a story becomes simply a capsule of a moment in time gone by, a crystallized gem of pop culture and youthful angst that exists to provoke nostalgia in those who were also there, who also heard the music and spoke the slang. This brand of tale makes for a good story, but not necessarily moving fiction of the caliber of Cloud Atlas. A nostalgic story is entertaining and enlightening about what it truly felt like to exist in that one moment — true good fiction, on the other hand, is meaningful to anyone, anywhere, in any time that picks up the book and gives it go.

For example, Stephen King wrote one of his best stories with the nostalgic, coming-of-age story The Body (movie “Stand by Me“), but it was the “best” because the rest of his work is entertaining but fluffy genre fiction. Mitchell, on the other hand, has proven himself a writer of vision, of purpose, of scope. Therefore, it was not his “best” as it would have been King’s.

Black Swan Green is a great story, one that became very good in the second half where it dragged a bit in the first. But — y’all know how I like to insert that big, ominous BUT — it didn’t live up. I don’t regret reading it by any means but I know that Mitchell is capable of more depth and scope. Still a devoted fan, I wait on pins and needles for the next effort.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

John’s Wife (Robert Coover)

Robert Coover is one of the most amazing, incredibly influential writers you’ve probably never heard of. I know I was only introduced to him in college during one of those American Fiction survey courses with a textbook four inches thick covering the classic, modern short stories: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” or “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Caleveras County” by Mark Twain. Coover’s classic is “The Babysitter,” a story that in retrospect I didn’t understand all that well. The tale shifts perspective constantly and explores all the threads of the possible, changing the plot in front of your eyes. As a student, I found the story ominous and portentous, as if there was a mystery there I needed to figure out, a mystery that was going to end worse than I could ever imagine. I re-read the story later in his book “Pricksongs and Descants” (and reviewed it here) and now understand that, sure, it was ominous but it was also sheer play, a man who is throwing around words like marbles on pavement, seeing which ones fall in to the realm of the possible and in awe of how they glint and prism in the sunlight. Robert Coover is also a professor at Brown, the school I would earn my MFA from if pure desire were the only qualification for admission. Sigh. No really, I’m not bitter. Just mildly bruised.

With all this glowing praise thus far, you will understand that I really looked forward to reading more of his work and decided recently upon his 1998 novel, “John’s Wife.” Why? It was on the shelf at the library. May not be the best reason but I gotta tell you I am thankful it was there because I was flabbergasted and amazed by this book. From the cover of the book to the last word (which is “Once,” not that that spoils anything), I was hooked. Again, Coover is his fabulist meta self, shifting narrator from paragraph to paragraph throughout a cast of characters who inhabit a nameless Midwestern (I think) town.

Forty one characters to be exact–I just counted. This movement between the 41 causes the plot to shift back and forth in time as well as reveal the past and future in tempting bits and pieces, crumbs of the pie so to speak. At times, the narration passes from person to person like the flu, moving with a touch or an interaction to the next person in contact. Other times, it revolves around a theme. For example, let’s see what everyone in town is dreaming tonight or let’s chronicle how everyone lost their virginity–when, with whom, with each other? Only one person’s name may be in the title (John) and the subject of that title (John’s wife) is never identified as anything else. That’s because despite the title, this is the story of an entire town. The stories of entire lives, successes, mistakes, humanity. The story of how different, similar and connected all of those individual lives are, to the point that maybe they aren’t individual at all. Maybe our own voices are not distinct in the crowd, and we thinkwe can hear ourselves only to stave off madness.

Of course, let me quote the author’s own words, told in the voice of the philosophical town librarian to her pharmacist husband after watching a monster movie:

“We like to think, even when we’re being reasonable, that there are fixed boundaries—to our bodies, our essential being, our homes and families, our towns and nations—it’s how we know or think we know we have a self. But maybe it’s all a mad delusion, maybe there are no boundaries and no selves either, our conscious life just a way of hiding the real truth from us because, simply, it’s too much to live with. We have to stuff it back down in the pit where the creepies live, if we want to function at all, even if functioning, as we call it, is possibly the craziest thing we do. Art, even bad art like Hollywood horror movies, puts us in touch with that truth by breaking down the boundaries for a moment, producing monsters we secretly know to be more real than the good citizens that eventually subdue them.”

I say I was hooked. Now, I don’t want to mislead you with that phrase. It did take me a bit over two weeks to finish “John’s Wife” and that is a really long time in Kate world. Therefore let me warn you that this brilliant, witty narration can also be thick and confusing. The first hundred pages, I had to keep referring back to see who was who in an effort to keep the names straight. And the in-your-head streaming of thoughts made me often pause to catch my breath so I read in short–but satisfying–bursts. The concept, which I am amazed Coover was able to sustain so well for so long, sometimes makes the reader think that they are losing track of the plot, a confusing sensation that makes you doubt your own abilities of comprehension.

But of course, the characters are thrown into that world of doubt, too, of doubting their eyes, their hearts, their own existence. In the beginning, the characters may have reminded me of my grandmother and her sisters and friends, who grew up in a small town in days she paints with the “good ‘ole” brush. But then we see sin, temptation, greed, orgies, homosexuality of both sexes (which no longer remind me of my grandmother, naturally). We see reformed sinners as well as the religious kind in disguise. Oh and it gets better. After that comes the supernatural. Ghosts, metaphysical experiences, medical abnormalities, alternate realities. Fire, giants, gods, art.

I think the reader is supposed to experience that sensation of disorientation. Lose the train of thought that is. Get lost in the coal smoke and see that the scenery rolling by is becoming more surrealistic. Like you are on the track to hell but everyone sees, no one denies it and the rest of humanity does not implode, vanish or in any other way prove that it is not really happening. So it is really happening. Your disbelief is suspended into the atmophere, or even over the rainbow into Oz.
Let me again quote the author in the words of the town newspaperman/hopeful author, who missed an issue of the paper due to a personal meltdown:

He had not, for the first time since he undertook the task, kept the record [published the newspaper], he knew that, but the record he had kept all these years, or thought he’d kept, was now, he found, dissolving on him, as though to teach him what he had always known—that words were not, as he liked to pretend, the stubborn monitors of time, adamant and fixed as number, but were time’s recombinatory toys and about as hard as water—and so to taunt him with the futility of his record-keeping mission… Art emerges, not from the seen, but from the longing for what is not seen.

Yet the reader keeps reading those futile words… and with gusto. Not because the words are facts, permanent and set. But because they are shifting, confusing, false and therefore totally human in a way that truth could never be.

Right? Have I lost ya? Well, can’t say that I blame you if I have. After all, it took me more than two weeks to digest it all and it is well worth the meal. I didn’t read a story. I read all the stories. Every story. I didn’t learn anything or have any revelations. Instead, I learned about the revelations behind the falsity of facts.

I was like Otis, the police cheif, whose…

… desire [was] now was to recapture that visionary moment just before, wherein, as he now recalled, his whole life as Officer Otis the guardian warrior had been revealed as a mockery, a self-delusion: what did his lifelong obsession with order and disorder have to do with this turbulent, radiant, and tender world which knew, at heart, no such distinction? … Yes, he had been ready at last to shed all artifice—to be a man merely of the here and now was to be a man closed out from eternity!—and to embrace, if it could be said to be embracable, the legendary abyss, which seemed to lie just beyond the war undulant flesh.

Two weeks. Yes, two weeks on one book is a long time for me, like watching a nine-hour marathon of Law and Order or The Sopranos (or some other deep show you like, doesn’t matter). You don’t regret it. In fact, you loved it. But it’s time to change the channel now, maybe towards some Gilligan’s Island or a nice game show. I think for my next book I will try out something fluffier, something that tells a nice story that moves from point A to point B and ends at point C. Not that such a linear plot means life, literature or art is so linear or logical or valid. But like the librarian character points out, we all need our little delusions and distractions.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hardcover

Dress Your Family in Corderoy and Denim (David Sedaris)

Witty gay man tells stories: A great cocktail party or a great book by David Sedaris, whose talent is for taking the ordinary or the embarassing and turning the tables, painting over the black white and gray with a rainbow of colors. Though he hates the rainbow flag being associated with “alternate lifestyles” (read: alternate sexualities) and swears he wasn’t asked to vote on that one.

I didn’t enjoy this book quite as much as Me Talk Pretty One Day (read that review here). The stories in this book were more “a day in the life” tales, whereas the other colelction (his first, I believe) were more the stories he had been accumulating over a lifetime, refining and analyzing to comic perfection. The cast of characters, which includes Sedaris’ unique family and his long-time boyfriend, is still both funny and human, light and yet often moving.

Case in point. One story regards his visit to his sister’s, where she vents the family-wide annoyance with Sedaris’ work and how it puts them on display for the world to see–at their most vulnerable, naked to their core personalities.

“We stopped for gas on the way home and were parking in front of her house when she turned to relate what I’ve come to think of as the quintessential Lisa story. ‘One time,’ she said, ‘one time I was out driving?’ The incident began with a quick trip to the grocery store and ended, unexpectantly, with a wounded animal stuffed into a pillowcase and held to the tailpipe of her car. Like most of my sister’s stories, it provoked a startling mental picture, capturing a moment in time when one’s actions seem both unimaginably cruel and completely natural. Details were carefully chosen and the pace built gradually, punctuated by a series of well-timed pauses. ‘And then… and then…’ She reached the inevitable conclusion and just as I started to laugh, she put her head against the steering wheel and fell apart. It wasn’t the gentle flow of tears you might release when recalling an isolated action or event, but the violent explosion that comes when you realize that all such events are connected, forming an endless chain of guilt and suffering.

I instinctively reached for the notebook I keep in my pocket and she grabbed my hand to stop me. ‘If you ever,’ she said, “ever repeat that story, I will never talk to you again.’

In the movie version of our lives, I would have turned to offer her comfort, reminding her, convincing her that the action she’d described had been kind and just. Because it was. She’s incapable of acting otherwise.

In the real version of out lives, my immediate goal was to simply to change her mind. ‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘The story’s really funny, and, I mean, it’s not like you’re going to do anything with it.’

Your life, your privacy, your occasional sorow — it’s not like you’re going to do anything with it. Is this the brother I always was, or the brother I have become?”

Telling a story–telling a true story–can be a powerful thing, which is naturally why we love them so much, especially when someone like Sedaris is the story-teller. Those tales are real, real people, real circumstances… of someone who is not us, who we don’t feel bad about laughing at. In Sedaris’ case, though, he often makes sure we are laughing with him, with his family and friends. We laugh because we see ourselves there. And that is no mean feat.

Read this book. Read this book if, especially if, you don’t usually read books. It may just give you the bug.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection

On Beauty (Zadie Smith)

This is my second Zadie Smith book, the first being The Autograph Man, an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying story about opposites. In much the same way, On Beauty is an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying story about physical and mental attraction and worth. Yet again, there is the multi-ethnic smoothie that Smith loves to project upon every corner of the world–a white professor married to a black non-academic with three kids, one religious, one academic and one a horrifying and annoying parody of a rich black kid imitating glorified street culture. (Man that kid bothered me!) Just to add some more drama to the mix, let’s throw conservatism against liberalism and art history against deconstructionism. Just for fun, you know, to see what fireworks happen.

Like a kid in a science lab, Smith seems to be dreaming up experiments and throwing them together to see the results, which she is naturally (and obviously in some areas) making up as she goes along. The result for me was that plot points seemed incredibly artificial and staged–sure, the protagonist’s main enemy moves across the ocean to take a position at that specific university. Yep, really likely. Or the mid-life crisis with the balding man lusting after some hot, young student–couldn’t she have taken a slightly unique tack on that one? Or the very talented yet poor boy who is buoyed up and ultimately crushed by the system of the insecure rich and over-educated. Nope, I never heard that one before, right?

Zadie Smith is not a bad writer. Quite the opposite. She strings together words into necklaces worthy of princesses in ball gowns and her characters can be strikingly memorable at points. But this book seems like a rushed and mismatched melting pot of ideas, a half-baked plan presented as a main course. And what did I learn about beauty? Not much. However, I did discover yet one more place that it is not. I guess that is something.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars = mediocre