The Bee Sting (Murray)

I read Skippy Dies and appreciated it for Murray’s understanding of adolescence and particularly how it shows up at a private school, which is where I was teaching at the time. This one is engaging, but almost too ambitious. Is it about the crash in Ireland? Is it another apocalypse story? Is it a novel about coming to terms with one’s sexual identity? Is it a novel about the choices we do and don’t make? About parents and children? It’s certainly long enough to be about all of those things, but there were (literally) hundreds of pages at the beginning when it just seemed to be a family having to adjust to reduced economic circumstances because of the downturn in Ireland.

Then Murray hits the accelerator and the onion is peeled back. The story goes in a zillion directions and Murray, at times, can’t resist some of the excessive cleverness that seeped into Skippy Dies. The ending is well-orchestrated and, unlike in one particular character’s narrative, form does follow function here.

So a good book? Yes. Not an award-winner, in my view. And you can definitely wait for paperback.

Biography of X (Lacey)

The best word to describe this novel (and it is, despite the title, a novel) is “ambitious.” It is part-dystopia, and the central events of the dystopia are major, though Lacey never makes them necessary. The commentary on the art word seems a more elaborated version of Neil Labute’s work in The Shape of Things. There is a feminist angle as well, though again, nothing about it seems fresh. There are footnotes and photos as though this is, in fact, a biography, The protagonist is somewhat bland, though that might be part of the artistic commentary – she has become only X’s creation – and now that X has died, what’s left? Some of the writing felt sloppy – the introduction of real historical names and medical conditions that get introduced late – all made it feel like Lacey struggled to find an ending,

Erasure (Everett)

I did this backwards and saw American Fiction first, and all the praise to Cord Jefferson for his much-deserved Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. I’m going to go ahead and say it – the movie is better. I think Jefferson made the wise choice to include less of Everett’s novel-within-the-novel and develop more of Monk’s internal conflict about whether to write it. The scene in his father’s study where he interacts with the characters he’s creating is a masterpiece. There are various other asides that were likely easy to dispense with, and Hollywood did what Hollywood does with love stories. I think both the movie and the book end well. Since I was disappointed by the ending of Everett’s The Trees, I was pleased with how he wrapped this one up – the pacing was better and the choices seemed earned. Looking forward to James.

I Have Some Questions for You (Makkai)

I really, really liked The Great Believers. This one, however, came across more like the work of Donna Tartt, whose books I do not enjoy and whose reputation I do not understand. The construction of the plot is solid, and I was pleased that Makkai didn’t reach for the predictable ending, but mostly I found that I just didn’t care about these people. Everyone in the novel has their story and their flaws, and that’s an admirable road to attempt, but it seemed like in the interest of being comprehensive, Makkai sacrificed depth, particularly when it came to the person in prison. Another very forgettable boarding school novel.

Clay’s Quilt (House)

It merited a 20th Anniversary Edition, so that says something. It’s easy to see the talent here in what was, I believe, House’s first novel. He creates a world and its inhabitants quite effectively. If his shifting between points of view feels a little loose at times, just roll with it. There’s also too much self-conscious dialogue. Remember that scene in Wall Street where Charlie Sheen goes out on the balcony and says, “Who am I?” The thing is, nobody actually says stuff like that, and House falls into that trap on a somewhat regular basis.

The Prologue is absolutely gripping. I immediately felt comfortable in House’s hands. It didn’t surprise me that the pace had to slow somewhat for the story, but he also seemed on less certain footing, prone to the first novelist’s flaw of trying to stuff everything into that first novel.

I will certainly try another one of his books. I suspect his writing improves over time.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (Yates)

When Revolutionary Road was revived some 20 or so years ago, I caught the wave and loved it. But I don’t know if I tried any more Yates after that. For some reason, a collection of his short stories, aptly named Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, appealed to me as a way to find him again.

While, as with all period writing (see Sinclair Lewis, for example), the dialogue does not always ring true, Yates is again very skilled here at creating that aching feeling of being alone in a crowd. Think of the scene in the Revolutionary Road movie (which I thought was pretty good) in which DiCaprio adjusts his hat as he’s leaving the train station (I think – it’s been a while) and the camera reveals dozens and dozens of men who look exactly like him, all commuting from what was perceived as the promised land of the suburbs into the city for work.

Here, we find decent people in trying circumstances (sometimes related to the war) that just can’t seem to do what another writer advises us to do – “Just connect.” And again, it’s not as if they are off in the woods alone. We have married people, soldiers in a company, old friends. Things just misfire because, I think – and this is the core of Yates’ emotional honesty – they so often do.

The Other Name: Septology I-II (Fosse, trans. by Searls)

Well, imagine the movie Sliding Doors, but instead of separate stories, the stories merge – not only the current ones, but the ones from the past as well. Add a healthy serving of Catholocism and the same ideas about punctuation as you find in Ducks, Newburyport. At first, I found it a bit pretentious and, since it lacks a single period or really any significant white space, it’s hard to pick up and put down. I was engaged by the discussion about art – maybe I’m just on a roll with that topic (see review of Teju Cole’s Tremor). And I began to wonder if Fosse would have these worlds collide in any way. There are even some genuinely suspenseful moments, like when the two children go for a walk or the young boy accepts a ride he’s been told to refuse. And, since it’s Norway, there’s a strong sense of isolation. And lutefisk. Will I read the next 5 parts? Maybe, but I’m not in a hurry to get to them.

Oliver Twist (Dickens)

Lin-Manuel Miranda rightly gets a lot of credit for extracting an amazing musical from a biography of Alexander Hamilton. Lionel Bart deserves similar credit for pulling a musical out of this 500-page novel. Since I’m pretty familiar with the musical, much of the story was familiar to me. I don’t know whether to say that the parts that Bart dropped for the musical felt unnecessary or whether they felt unnecessary because they weren’t part of the musical. I did have a little trouble tracking Dickens’ characters. I thought one character was using two names, but it was, in fact, two characters.

What I want to talk about, though, is Fagin. I know there are many, Roth among them, who see Shylock as Ground Zero for the perception of Jews. Perhaps because I was introduced to Fagin first, I’ve always wondered about how Dickens rendered him. And he is, indeed, a gross stereotype. Suggestive of the times? Dickens’ own anti-Semitism? I’m not enough of a scholar of either to say. Is there enough here for high schools to re-think staging the musical? I think so. Dickens’ descriptions of Fagin’s appearance and behavior go beyond, in my mind, what is necessary to create a villainous character. And these descriptions are only supplemented by George Cruinkshank’s illustrations. Did Dickens approve them? I don’t know. I do imagine that if he objected, he would have been able to say something. And there are a few other moments. When Oliver is temporarily away from Fagin and Sykes, he is given a better set of clothes. He asks that his former rags be sold. That would have been enough. He wants to shed that identity. But Dickens goes further and has Oliver request that they be sold to “The Jew.” Now is that what Jewish people did then and there (in Dickens’ perception? in Oliver’s hardly worldly perception?) And if a book featuring a caricature like Fagin was turned into a musical, would it be produced? South Pacific anyone? And a book that featured our hero calling another character “The ___________”?

I know the argument – that these novels and these musicals are products of their times. I am also aware how much easier it is for a high school to afford the rights to the likes of Oliver! than say, Hamilton. And high schools are a battleground now. If people didn’t believe they were places where ideas were exchanged and perpetuated, then why all of the efforts at book bans? Curricular control? So ban the show? Naw. Make sure people know what they’re doing with it. Absolutely.

Constitutional (Simpson)

Consider this sentence, found on the second page of the first story, “The Door,” in this excellent collection. Simpson writes:

Since the seventeenth of August I had grown unimaginative about others, selfishly incurious and sometimes downright hostile.

As a hook, it’s outstanding. What happened on August 17th? But it is the word ‘unimaginative’ that prompted me to do something I almost never do – I underlined the sentence. . . in pen!

I wonder what other words, if any, Simpson considered in place of ‘unimaginative.’ But mostly I was struck by the underlying assumptions of decency in this sentence. We have a responsibility to be imaginative and curious. And not hostile. And the protagonist of this first story is so taken with the employees she encounters at a shop that she allows herself to return to her own humanity. On the surface, she simply needs a door fixed, and she is trying a new repair shop. Watch how elegantly Simpson moves from the external to the internal:

Everything here had to do with maintenance and soundness. Grief kept indoors grows noxious, I thought, like a room that can’t be aired; mould grows, plants die. I wanted to open the windows but it wasn’t allowed.

Here Simpson also introduces a motif that runs throughout the collection – grief, particularly women’s grief. In “Early One Morning,” she writes, “Is it true, then, that women can take grief as grief (thought Zoe), but men refuse to do that, they have to convert it into diesel in order to deal with it, all the loss and pain converted into rage?” (Read that out loud, including the parenthetical piece. That’s pure music. It’s also Truth.)

A brilliant collection.

Tremor (Cole)

I devoured this Anisfield-Wolf-award-winner (https://www.anisfield-wolf.org/winners/tremor/) in about a day. Cole writes with such clarity and incisiveness – whether it’s about the funeral announcements his protagonist receives from his University or the not-so-simple act of making a purchase of a souvenir on the street or an antique at a market. Cole writes gentle sentences (and therefore I find Deborah Levy’s description of the book as ‘dazzling’ to be odd). He conjures characters and moments through the restrained accumulation of his prose. Don’t go into this book expecting any major drama. I haven’t read all of his work, but I’ve never found him inclined to provide too much plot. Here, he shifts narrators without warning. He covers familiar topics, like music and art, particularly photography with infectious enthusiasm. Pay attention to his protagonist’s efforts to photograph a hedge. They are fine example of what I mean by a restrained accumulation of prose. The moments may not seem like much independently, but together they offer much to contemplate. Is he taking pictures? Or is he making art? On whose land?

I found myself wondering about the e-book edition of this book. Every time he talked about a piece of music or a photograph, I found myself longing for a link that would allow me to listen or view the piece.

The title of the novel reverberates throughout and works on multiple levels. Nothing here is world-shattering, but it is a kind of warning of what might be on the way.