"All Roads Lead to Austen," by Amy Elizabeth Smith

Readers of this blog know how much I admire and love the work of Jane Austen. So I generally enjoy reading about others who also love Austen’s work. I recently read an unusual twist on this genre, “All Roads Lead to Austen: A Yearlong Journey with Jane” (Sourcebooks, 2012). It is a combination of a memoir, a travel book, a love letter to Austen, and a romance. The author, Amy Elizabeth Smith, is an English professor specializing in Austen, so the book is clearly informed by that background, but is written for general readers rather than for academics. Smith decides to take her sabbatical/study leave year to travel through Mexico, Central America, and South America, visiting six countries in all. She studies Spanish in Guatemala, teaches a class for American students abroad at a Chilean university, and sightsees. But her main unifying theme and activity is holding a series of reading groups, at least one in each country, each focusing on one of Austen’s novels (read in Spanish translation). The sessions are held in Spanish, and the members of the groups vary quite a bit in age, education, social class, and sophistication about literature. Some of Smith’s best-laid plans go astray, as members are added to or drop out of groups, dates are changed, locations are changed, and some participants do not finish the assigned books. She learns to go with the flow and accept these changes. Her main goal is to find out whether Austen’s novels, characters, and themes are understood and enjoyed in the same way everywhere, or whether they are mediated by national, cultural, and language factors. Her conclusion is that some aspects are universal and some are in fact culturally determined. She writes in a lively manner about each group and each locale, as well as about the people she meets, the adventures and misadventures she has, and her own feelings about her travels and project. She has a light and often humorous touch in her writing, but always with great respect and appreciation for her participants. And oh, by the way, do you remember I mentioned “romance”? Yes, the author experiences some romance during her trip, with a happy ending….what could be more like an Austen novel?

A Tribute to Nora Ephron

I am very sad about writer Nora Ephron’s recent (6/26/12) death at the too-early age of 71. She was extremely gifted and prolific: a successful journalist, essayist, screenwriter, director, producer, and more. Her books included “Heartburn,” “Crazy Salad,” and “Scribble, Scribble”; her movies included “Heartburn,” “Silkwood,” “When Harry Met Sally…,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail,” and “Julie and Julia.” She entertained us and she made us think. She was a pioneer in much of the work she did; even now, women in the film industry are rare. In her movies there were always women characters who were strong, believable, and interesting; female filmgoers could identify with these characters. This was more unusual than it should have been; as the Washington Post obituary reminds us, she once stated that to male studio moguls, “a movie about a woman’s cure for cancer is less interesting than a movie about a man with a hangnail.” And -- as that quotation indicates -- she was a feminist. In so many ways, in so much of what she did, she spoke for women. She was rarely a polemicist and mostly wrote with humor, thus getting her points across even more effectively. In fact, she was a one-woman rebuttal of the old canard that feminists have no sense of humor. She will be very much missed.

Everything I Am Reading Now

I believe I have mentioned here that I am usually reading several things at a time, and go back and forth among them. Because at certain times I feel more like reading certain books or periodicals. Or certain books or magazines are easier to carry if I will be out and about. Or a library book is due soon, or overdue. Or I plan to discuss a certain book with someone, or pass it on to someone, so it goes to the top of the pile. Right now I have even more than usual on my partly-read pile; to give you a flavor of the combinations I usually have in my currently-reading pile, I list the items here, in the order, more or less, in which I started them. 1. “Mending: New and Selected Stories,” by Sallie Bingham. 2. “Preacher’s Lake,” by Lisa Vice. 3. “The Memory Chalet,” by Tony Judt. 4. “The Last September,” by Elizabeth Bowen. 5. The July 2/9, 2012 issue of The Nation magazine. 6. “Interpreting Experience: The Narrative Study of Lives,” edited by Ruthellen Josselson and Amia Lieblich. 7. “Gone,” by Cathi Hanauer. 8. The July 12, 2012 issue of The New York Review. 9. Today’s edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, the print version. 10. I am also listening to Anne Lamott’s “Some Assembly Required” on CD in the car. Note the mixture of novels, short stories, memoir, scholarly work, and periodicals; this is a pretty typical conglomeration for me. I am pretty sure I will finish all of these eventually, although not in the same order I started them. I will also be posting about some of these in the near future.

There's Something Strange about "The Uninvited Guests"

What an original, diverting, and enjoyable book “The Uninvited Guests” (Harper, 2012), by Sadie Jones, is! Especially after the beautifully written but difficult, depressing worlds I have recently read about and posted on -- created by the authors of “Reckless Driver,” “Dirt,” “Are You My Mother?” and “Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?” -- this book is a refreshing change of pace. Not that it is exactly upbeat; there are family, money, and relationship problems, and the unusual problem of a horde of unexpected and certainly uninvited guests who have just been involved in a terrible train accident and need a place to shelter. The family that has to deal with them is a hodge-podge of characters at their country house. Charlotte, the mother, mostly leaves her two young adult children, Emerald and Clovis, and their friends and possible romantic partners, to handle this unique problem, in the midst of coping with other interpersonal issues. It turns out that someone from Charlotte’s past, Charlie Traversham-Beechers (what fun the author must have had in creating this name!) is among the uninvited guests, and he is determined to revisit that past and to exploit the situation to his advantage. As the novel proceeds, it is slowly revealed that not all is as it seems, and a sort of gothic element gradually takes over. But Jones expertly balances that gothic element with the very real issues and interchanges found among the characters, so we readers are kept on edge, not quite knowing where we are and how the story will turn out. This off-balance aspect is what stands out in this novel, along with the intriguing characters and slightly creepy setting. I heard distorted echoes of all sorts of houses, redolent of mystery and the occult, that have been portrayed in other novels over the years. This mixture of mysterious atmosphere with the tart and crisp writing is a winner. Normally I don’t like anything supernatural in my fiction, but this instance is managed so well, and is so firmly rooted in the quotidian that I was charmed and drawn in. What I didn’t feel, however, was any real connection to any of the characters. But I am not sure that the author intended us to feel such a connection; it isn’t really the point of the literary game she is playing. She plays her own surprising game well, and readers are in good hands with this novel.

Four Bleak Books

Four of the books I have written about in the past two weeks have depicted some of the hardest, saddest, most depressing childhoods and young adulthoods that I have read about for a while, along with, in some cases, the wrenching lifelong consequences of such childhoods. Two of the books -- Alison Bechdel’s “Are You My Mother?” and Jeanette Winterson’s “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” -- are memoirs; two of them -- Lisa Vice’s “Reckless Driver” and David Vann’s “Dirt” -- are novels. Vann has -- as I wrote in my post about “Dirt” -- said in interviews that the main character is based on himself, but exaggerated; I cannot say how much of “Reckless Driver” is based on Vice’s own childhood, but certain biographical facts suggest that at least some of the story may be drawn, at least indirectly, from the author’s own experiences. In all four cases, the parents are abusive and neglectful. These books focus in particular on the mother characters and their shortcomings. Although the biggest villain in “Reckless Driver” is the father, even the mother in that novel is neglectful. Three of the books write of violence in the family; although the exception, Bechdel’s book, doesn’t focus on physical violence, there is a kind of verbal and emotional abuse inflicted on the young Alison by her mother. All four of these books are important and well written; I am glad they were written, although it must have been painful for the authors to do so. Perhaps the power of words, of verbal and literary expression, was the mitigating factor for them. As for readers: Reading these books is also painful, but it is important that writers write (whether in memoir or fiction) about such experiences, even the most terrible ones, as they are part of life and we need to know about them. If we have had such experiences ourselves, this may be healing to know others understand; if we have not, it is important for us to understand them. That said, I must say that these four books read within such a short time period provided an unusually concentrated dose of bleakness; I am thankful for the small notes of hope in three of the four books (all but “Dirt”).

"Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?", by Jeanette Winterson

I somehow have never read (or at least don’t remember reading!) Jeanette Winterson’s famous novel “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,” nor any of her other work, although I have been aware of it for years. One day a couple of months ago on my way to work I was listening to a PBS-type talk show and heard her talking about her new memoir, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” (Grove, 2011); something about the topic and about her persona as it came across on the radio made me decide to read this book. What a deeply sad story of a terribly unhappy childhood it is, and yet what creativity and, eventually, fulfillment and happiness have come out of it. Winterson’s voice is engaging even as she tells of the crazy religiosity (her religion itself was not necessarily the problem, or only part of the problem, but her beliefs and applications of those beliefs were) and mental imbalance of her adoptive mother, and her father’s apparent inability to stand up against the mother and her cruel treatment of the child Jeanette. When her mother found that Jeanette was lesbian, she saw it as a terrible sin and could not accept it. Somehow, amazingly, Winterson has found the right tone to tell her story: readers are very aware of the awfulness of her childhood, and of the despair, depression, and even violence that followed in her adult life as a consequence, yet we are also aware of an irrepressible resilience that keeps Winterson afloat and allows her to leave home at 16, find ways to survive on her own, study at Oxford, become a writer and even, after many bad relationships, enter and sustain a loving partnership with the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach. The climax of the story is her finally deciding to look for her birth mother, and after much trouble and many struggles with the British bureaucracy as well as with her own doubts and hesitations, achieving success and a qualified sense of resolution. A strong theme throughout the memoir is the inspiring, life-giving, healing power of words and books. Although her mother thought non-religious books were sinful, the young Jeanette hid books under her mattress; when her mother discovered and burned them (yes, burned them!), Winterson started memorizing literature. Not having had a loving or secure home, she found that “books, for me, are a home…Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. There is warmth there too – a hearth” (p. 61). This is a wonderful and very apt expression of one of the great aspects of books. At Oxford, where she could read as much as she wanted, she felt that “the more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated….Literature is common ground” (p. 144). Another theme is that a few caring adults who reached out to the author -- a friend’s mother, a librarian, a teacher -- made a big difference in her life. This memoir is highly recommended.

"Are You My Mother?", by Alison Bechdel

In 2006, Alison Bechdel, writer and artist of the comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out for,” published the book “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” a bestselling graphic memoir about growing up in a funeral home and, especially, about her closeted homosexual and eventually suicidal father. The drawings in the book are intricate and the family story wrenching; Bechdel’s stance is to be completely candid, yet thoughtful and considerate of her family, and throughout, to try to figure out what it all means. Now this author has published a sort of companion graphic memoir focusing this time on her mother: “Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama” (Houghton Mifflin, 2012). Bechdel was and is close to her mother, speaking with her on the phone almost every day, yet feels that they have never understood each other. She feels she has never had her mother’s full attention and unstinting love. For example, her mother decided when the child Alison was seven years old that she was too old to be hugged. Bechdel explores their relationship through the years, cutting back and forth in time. She writes of her own writing and relationships, her lesbian identity, and her long years in therapy. She uses the ideas of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, as well as the writings of Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich, to help her understand her relationship with her mother. The book is complex and rich; the reader’s eyes are attracted to the drawings and to the words at the same time, and one truly needs to slow down to take it all in. It seems there would be a danger with this kind of material of the writer seeming solipsistic, but the persona of the writer is so patently open and eager to learn that one does not feel her work is self-indulgent. And despite the mother’s obvious lack of true connection and understanding, one has to feel sorry for her too because of her long difficult marriage, and the thwarting of her own dreams of being an actor and a poet. She does in fact act in small local productions, and starts writing poetry again in her later years, and we are happy to see her having these outlets. Somehow, despite all the problems and history between them, and despite Bechdel’s having to accept that her mother will probably never truly understand her or deeply connect with her, the two come to a sort of accommodation and continued conversation and relationship.

Struggling to Read about Life at Its Worst

Until this year, David Vann has been for a few years on the faculty of the MFA Program at the university where I teach, the University of San Francisco. Although he openly states that he has had a difficult family history, and a hard time at certain points in his life, his writing has finally gotten recognition in the past few years, including critical acclaim, several prestigious prizes in the U.S. and in Europe, and excellent sales. I don't know Vann at all well, but have conversed with him a couple of times at writing retreats and on campus, and he is -- as other faculty colleagues agree -- a charming, friendly, cheerful person. Yet he has obviously used his books to grapple with pain, violence, and disturbance in his past. Normally readers should not assume connections between an author's work and his life, but in this case Vann has been open about these connections, although fictionalized and transformed by his imagination and talent. His books are all about difficult, depressing topics, including suicide; there have been five suicides in his own extended family. I have read many reviews of the work of this prolific writer, and tried and failed -- because of the difficult subject matter -- to read “Caribou Island” and “Legend of a Suicide.” With the publication of his latest book, I determined to try again, and have now just finished reading his novel “Dirt” (Harper, 2012). According to an interview with the USF Magazine (Summer 2012), the story is “drawn from Vann’s mother’s side of the family…Vann doesn’t just air family secrets; he exaggerates them, creating something that looks like his own history, only more shameful and scandalous. Galen [the main character], Vann said, is…the worst possible version of himself.” The other main characters are Galen’s mother, grandmother, aunt, and cousin. It becomes clear that although there is love among at least some of them, there is also hatred, deep simmering resentment, secrets, and violence, both in their family history and in the present. Sartre’s famous line about hell’s being other people kept going through my mind. Galen, 22 years old, bulimic, and obviously disturbed, is living with his mother near Sacramento, California, attempting to practice his own version of New Age beliefs. The triteness but believability of Galen’s taking his direction from “Siddhartha” and “The Prophet” mixes with the rising awareness of the reader that this character is going off the rails. The events of the book are at first low key although ominous, and then build slowly and in torturous detail to a horrific conclusion. The last 120 pages of this 258-page book are excruciating to read. Once I could see what was happening, I was tempted to stop reading, but forced myself to continue. Vann is a master of showing how curdled family history can rot away the emotions and even sanity of its members. His writing and his control of his story are most admirable, but reading this book is beyond painful. I wish David Vann the best, and predict he will become even more well known than he already is, but at this point I doubt I will be reading more of his work. I fully admit this is because of my own limitations rather than any shortcomings of his brilliant writing.

Embarrassing Book Covers

Have you ever been embarrassed by the cover of a book you were reading? I am not a prude, but I am sometimes too self-conscious about what others think, and I have occasionally felt like hiding or obscuring the cover of a book I have been reading in public. When I took “Marriage: A Duet: Two Novellas,” by Anne Taylor Fleming, off the little pile of books I had brought along on a recent trip, ready to read it in an airport and on a plane, I was reminded that the cover consists of two painted Renaissance-style naked figures with only carefully placed fig leaves adorning them. Very artistic, not at all prurient. And the novel itself is very literary. I had to laugh at myself, but I noticed that I was keeping the book flat (rather than holding it in the air) when I was reading it, and turning it over when I closed and put it down, all in order to avoid displaying the cover. I knew this was silly of me, especially in this world full of far more revealing images; besides, no one else was even looking at me and what I was reading, or would care. It is the curse of self-consciousness, something that I can't seem to completely shake. The book, by the way, is about infidelity. One of the novellas tells the story of male infidelity and the aftermath and longterm consequences on the characters’ marriage. The other novella, about a different couple, tells of female infidelity and its effects on the husband in the story. Both novellas are well written and realistic and very readable, and the characters and their behavior are very believable.

"A Passionate Man," by Joanna Trollope

When I found out a couple of days before that I would be spending most of the day yesterday in a hospital waiting room while my husband was prepared for, had, and recovered from a medical procedure, I knew I would need the distraction of a book that was enjoyable but not too demanding. Otherwise I would just sit and stew with worry, and/or watch too much random bad television. I had recently picked up at a library sale Joanna Trollope’s “A Passionate Man” (Berkley, 1990), and on looking through my book pile, I decided this novel would be a suitable companion for my day at the hospital. (It turned out that I could wait in the hospital room rather than the waiting room.) Trollope, a descendant of Anthony Trollope, is one of the writers I mentioned in my 2/8/10 post about “middlebrow” literature. Over the years I have read several of her novels, and they have been reliably entertaining and quite well written. They are usually about middle-to-upper-middle-class characters in contemporary England, but somehow -- and I am sure this is purposeful -- they retain an aura of an earlier period in British life. The novels are clearly aimed at female readers, and contain just a tiny whiff of upscale romance novels. They are primarily about relationships, love, and families, and the main characters are generally women who are not-young-but-youngish-to-early-middle-aged. This novel, “A Passionate Man,” tells of Liza and Archie, a seemingly very happy couple in their late thirties, very much in love, living in a charming village, with three children, whose relationship is suddenly torn by emotional crises they undergo separately and together. Their marriage suddenly seems at risk. The problem with the book is that the crisis is too abrupt, with little build-up given, so it is not very believable. Other complications are thrown in: Archie’s relationship with his widowed father is so close that Liza feels left out; Archie can’t accept his father’s new marriage after all these years alone; one of the young couple’s children is very unhappy at boarding school; there is a local dust-up regarding a developer’s building houses on the field next to Archie’s and Liza’s house. There is a somewhat shocking development, which I won’t reveal here, but it seems too sudden and artificial a development as well. Somehow there just isn’t enough “there” there in this novel. But I am grateful to the book for helping to distract me from my worry yesterday, so I won’t complain too much about its shortcomings. Most important, my husband’s medical procedure went well, and he came home from the hospital today. That puts everything else in perspective.

"Have I Read This Book Before?": Discovering the Answer

After I wrote yesterday’s post on not remembering if I had already read Sue Miller’s 1993 novel, “For Love,” the question nagged at me, and I couldn’t resist taking the time to flip back through my “books read” notebook. Sure enough, I found that I had in fact read “For Love” in 1994. I have resigned myself to this kind of forgetting, and rationalize that it is because of the many years I have been reading and the many books I have read. Also reassuring is to hear that my friends have the same experience, so I am not alone in this. While I was looking through my list notebook, I ran across titles of some other books I had forgotten reading, as well as many that I well remembered. I was reminded too of some of my reading habits, such as going on “binges” of certain authors, or countries’ authors, and such as re-reading old favorites many times over the years. I am glad I have kept this list all these years; it helps me remember, and it gives me pleasure to revisit past reading.

"For Love," by Sue Miller

I have mentioned, and I know others have also had the experience of, forgetting if I have read a certain book. Even though I have kept a list of what I have read since I was 10 years old (see my post of 1/24/10), that list is in three notebooks (so far!) rather than computerized (OK, it was a while ago that I started the list!) and I don’t have the time now (maybe I will someday...) to go back and enter all the 5200-plus titles and authors into an online database. So it isn’t easy to check if I have already read a specific book, especially for books I may have read 20 or 30 or more years ago. I have read most if not all of Sue Miller’s novels, so when I recently picked up her book “For Love” (HarperPerennial, 1993) (as in “what I did for love”), I thought I had probably already read it, but it didn’t look familiar at all. And even when I read it, at which time a formerly-read book usually starts to sound familiar, it still didn’t ring a bell. It is possible that I had never read it before; it is also quite possible that I did read it 19 or so years ago and forgot it. Disconcerting but true. As for the novel itself: This is the story of Lottie, her brother Cam, and her childhood friend Elizabeth, who is also Cam’s lifelong object of love and desire. Middle-aged now, they reunite by happenstance in Cambridge, Massachusetts one summer, in and between their respective parents’ houses on their childhood street. Much drama ensues, including a tragic event. This novel focuses on the psychological, and on the way our childhoods continue to influence us into middle age and beyond. It also illustrates the longterm effects of social class; Lottie continues to resent the way Elizabeth, who lived in a much nicer house and whose parents were much wealthier, acted superior to Lottie during their teenage years. Although Lottie is a fairly successful writer now, and although Elizabeth is much friendlier now, Lottie is still wary of her and her heedless sense of entitlement. Although the novel is quite intense psychologically, it drags a bit at times. Still, overall this is a novel worth reading. Some critics have said that because Miller’s work is quite accessible (and I would add: because she writes about “women’s subjects”), she has been underestimated as a serious literary author; I think this assessment is correct.

My Current Favorite Contemporary Authors

I have in the past posted a couple of “favorite authors” lists on this blog; I now post my current favorite contemporary authors of fiction (either living, or having died recently). By favorite I mean not only that I very much like reading their novels and stories, but also that I consider them among the best writers writing. This list is not inclusive, and I will probably think of others soon after I post this list. And I do recognize that perhaps there “should” be more writers from outside the U.S. and Great Britain, more ethnic and racial minority writers, and more male writers; if the list were to include all writers I have ever read from the past as well as current writers, the totals would be more “balanced”; for example, overall I may have read almost as many male as female writers, and I have at times read many novels from India, Africa, South America, Europe, and elsewhere, as well as much fiction by Asian American, Hispanic American, and African American authors. So, without further ado, here are my favorite contemporary authors as of right now, in alphabetical order: Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Carolyn Cooke, Anita Desai, Emma Donoghue, Margaret Drabble, Anne Enright, Jane Gardam, Barbara Gowdy, Tessa Hadley, Alan Hollinghurst, Helen Humphreys, Tania James, Gish Jen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Penelope Lively, Ian McEwan, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Antonya Nelson, Stewart O’Nan, Lori Ostlund, Julie Otsuka, Ann Patchett, Edith Pearlman, Tom Rachman, Anne Raeff, Richard Russo, Carol Shields, Mona Simpson, Zadie Smith, Jean Thompson, Colm Toibin, William Trevor, Valerie Trueblood, and Anne Tyler.

"Reckless Driver," by Lisa Vice

I read “Reckless Driver” (Plume, 1995), by Lisa Vice, because the author is the wife of a friend. I had a little bit of that feeling one has when reading something by a friend, or a relative or friend of a friend: “What if it I don’t like it? What will I say to my friend?” Fortunately, in this case I didn’t have to worry, because the book is wonderful. It is beautifully written and the characters are perfectly drawn. Most of the story is told in the voice of a young girl, Lana. She tells of her family -- her father, her mother, and her older (teenaged) sister Abbie -- and of her neighbors in their small town in Indiana in the 1960s. The family is rather poor, although hanging on, so one focus of the novel is social class. The larger focus is how helpless children are in their homes and lives, how vulnerable they are. In this case, the father -- called “The Old Man” by the girls -- loves his daughters but is (it soon becomes clear) mentally disturbed -- probably at least partly because of his war service and experiences -- and abusive. The girls even fantasize about his death, although Lana feels -- despite everything -- a sort of residual love and loyalty to him. Their mother is unhappy in her marriage, cheerfully unfaithful to her husband, and -- although she seems to love them -- does very little to protect the girls from their father. The story is profoundly sad. Yet there are moments of happiness, of love and of fun. Despite everything, the voices of the girls are surprisingly strong and even resilient. Lana especially seems to have an unquenchable spirit; some of this may be due to a caring neighbor, Marvella, who unobtrusively but consistently watches out for Lana. I must say that this book was depressing to read, yet it was compelling, with surprising notes of hope.

"A Short History of Women," by Kate Walbert

Regular readers of this blog would probably think, as I did myself, that I would immediately want to read a novel titled “A Short History of Women” (Scribner, 2009), which was written by a respected author, Kate Walbert, and which was well-reviewed. I remember picking it up and looking at it in the library and then in a bookstore, and somehow -- despite the title and the good reviews -- not being drawn to it enough to buy or borrow it. Recently, however, when browsing in an excellent independent bookstore in Healdsburg, Copperfield’s, I saw the book on the sale table, and this time I decided I wanted to read it. I knew I was going to be taking a long plane trip soon after, so I put it on my mental packing list for that trip. Although it is not the kind of novel that keeps a reader turning pages quickly, it is a thoughtful and engaging book. It tells the story of five generations of women, from the late 19th century to the early 21st century, in a family spanning England and the United States. (I happen to be a big fan of “generations of women” novels.) The first woman, Dorothy Trevor Townsend, was a suffragette who starved herself for the cause. The succeeding generations are all, directly or indirectly, influenced by her life and cause. The story cuts back and forth among the characters and the time periods, which is sometimes a bit jarring, but overall is effective. The strength of the novel is its reminder of how the discrimination women have experienced from generation to generation is an ongoing factor in women’s lives. Some women are more aware of it than others; some suffer from it more than others; some are more dedicated and/or braver in their fight against it than others (often because they have enough privilege and capital -- financial and social/cultural -- to do so). This description perhaps makes the novel sound like a polemic; it is not. The “women’s issue” forms a connecting thread throughout, but the stories of the women’s lives over the years are full of family, relationships, careers, and more, and are compelling in their own right.

"Old Girlfriends," by David Updike

Until a recent trip to the Mill Valley Friends of the Library book sale (which I have mentioned several times on this blog as a favorite source of books), I hadn’t realized, or at least hadn’t remembered, that the late great John Updike’s son David Updike is also a published writer of fiction. (Such instances always make me wonder, as I imagine they do you, what it must be like to be the child of a famous author who also wants to write. Of course there must be advantages regarding role modeling, influence, and access, but what a burden to be constantly and very publicly compared with one's parent.) At the sale, I picked up Updike Junior's short story collection, “Old Girlfriends” (St. Martin’s, 2009). It turns out he has published several books, including a quartet of books for “young readers.” He also illustrated a children’s book written by his father. Although it may not be fair to read the son’s work in the light of the father’s, I of course couldn’t resist doing so. However, as I read, that focus faded. There are definitely influences from the senior Updike’s writing, not only in style but also in settings and subject matter (families, relationships, infidelity, suburbia). Surprisingly, though, I also detected -- in some of the stories -- the stylistic influence of Hemingway. But because the main focus is on human relationships, and because the stories are well written, I enjoyed this collection. Would I go out of my way to find more of David Updike’s work? Probably not. But if I ran across another of his books, I would pick it up and leaf through it, and possibly buy or borrow it.

Read Them When Young, Read Them When Older?

Yesterday I wrote about rediscovering and resubscribing to The New York Review of Books. One passage in the 5/24/12 issue particularly caught my eye, as it so well expressed a feeling about books that I have also sometimes felt. In Giles Harvey’s review of Geoffrey Dyer’s new book, “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews,” he quotes Dyer as writing that “at twenty I imagined I would spend my middle age reading books that I didn’t have the patience to read when I was young. But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty. At that age I plowed through everything in the Arnoldian belief that each volume somehow nudged me imperceptibly closer to the sweetness and light. I read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Ulysses, Moby Dick. I got through The Idiot even though I hated practically every page of it. I didn’t read The Brothers Karamazov: I’ll leave it till I’m older, I thought – and now that I am older I wish I’d read it when I was younger, when I was still capable of doing so.” Although I do not share his feelings about some of the specific examples Dyer lists, I do relate to his point. When I was in high school, college, graduate school, and for a while after, I also “plowed through” many books I didn’t actually enjoy all that much, but wanted to know the books, to engage with them, to have read them, to have them as part of my experience. Now these many years later, I am more likely, as I have written about here before, to let myself off the hook if I am not enjoying a book, or even if I think in advance that I will not enjoy one. This may not be ideal, but I accept it about myself. I must say I appreciate Dyer’s expressing his feelings about this (although it is quite possible he is exaggerating a bit for effect).

Rediscovering The New York Review of Books

Many years ago, I subscribed to The New York Review of Books. I enjoyed it, and learned from it, but the review essays were so long and dense that I would sometimes put off reading them, and the copies would pile up to a point that they felt oppressive and made me feel guilty. And I was reading so many other periodicals. So I somewhat reluctantly but realistically stopped subscribing, and have picked the periodical up only occasionally since then. Until… A couple of weeks ago in an independent bookstore, I saw the NYR for sale; something drew me to it and on a whim, I picked up a copy. A couple of days later, I started reading it and found almost every review/essay absorbing and well written. Some standouts were a poignant essay by Jerome Groopman about a boy who died partly because of his doctors’ mistakes; E. L. Doctorow’s beautiful essay about Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” which rekindled the feelings I had when I read this novel in college; W. S. Merwin’s “Poem for Adrienne Rich,” which brought tears to my eyes as I continue to mourn this great poet and feminist; an Anthony Grafton review of Andrew Delbanco’s “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be”; Joyce Carol Oates on Jeanette Winterson’s new memoir; Darryl Pinckney on post-blackness; Nadine Gordimer on current South Africa; and Garry Wills on the implacable hatred between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy (as portrayed in Robert Caro’s fourth volume of his Johnson biography). And these were only the highlights. What a rich array of topics, well-known writers, and important books reviewed. I was reminded of how the NYR consistently commissions some of the best writers alive to write essays that are far more than simply book reviews; thus readers learn so much from the review essays, and have the added pleasure of the high-quality writing. I was bedazzled all over again! Then, serendipitously, a day later I saw in The Nation magazine an ad for a very reduced cost trial subscription to the NYR. This confluence of events seemed to be a sign; it seemed it was meant to be that I subscribe again, after all these years. And so I did.

"Letters to a Friend," by Diana Athill

What a delight to have a new book from the wonderful Diana Athill! I have written about this author before (3/15/10): She is in her 90s and after a long career as an esteemed editor for the publisher Andre Deutsch, became famous late in life for her series of memoirs, including “Yesterday Morning,” “Stet,” and “Somewhere Towards the End,” all of which I thoroughly enjoyed. The new book is “Letters to a Friend” (Norton, 2011). Since 1980, Athill had been corresponding with the American poet Edward Field. He kept all her letters, and felt that others would enjoy them and they should be published. I am glad he proposed this, and she agreed, as her letters from almost thirty years confirm the impressions I already had from the memoirs; they are direct, immediate, frank, kind, detailed, funny, and genuine. She is clearly a good and loyal friend, not only to Field (with whom she is still corresponding) and his partner Neil Derrick, but to her other friends. She is modest and self-deprecating, but not too much so. She frankly admits that she is enjoying the attention and fame that have come to her late in life, but she is also well aware of -- and writes wryly about -- the ebbs and flows of such fame. She speaks of both the pains and joys of being an older person. By the end of the collection, a reader feels she knows Athill’s world, her writing, her friends, her routines. One interesting thread throughout is the fact that Athill writes the letters (and her memoirs) with pen and paper, then a typewriter, and finally, reluctantly, a word processor/computer; she writes entertainingly about the process of moving through and adjusting to these various writing implements. Sometimes published collections of letters can be somewhat mixed and even downright tedious, but this one is always engaging, never dull. Highly recommended.

"Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake," by Anna Quindlen

As a member of the Baby Boomer generation, I enjoy reading memoirs and other books written by my contemporaries; I feel a real connection to people who have experienced the same slice of time, of history, at the same age. There have been several books by Baby Boomers about what it is like to get into the territory formerly labeled “old.” Of course my generation, with its sense of itself as exceptional, has relabeled these years. “Sixty is the new forty.” “Old age now means at least 70 or 75.” These are the stories we tell ourselves. We are too healthy, too active, too involved, to be old. (Except for when we are not; we have all experienced, or had friends our age who have experienced, serious health problems.) One such book is the one I have just read, Anna Quindlen’s “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir” (Random House, 2012). Quindlen, a novelist/journalist/columnist/self-help author, shares memories of her own life and work, along with reflections on aging and intimations of mortality both as she has experienced them and in a wider context. One section I particularly liked was her thoughts on the big changes in women’s lives over the past 40 years or so, and the related issues that still exist. The book is thoughtful and serious, yet with a light touch. It is easy to read and to connect to, especially for fellow Baby Boomer women, but I think younger and older readers would enjoy the book as well.

"Crusoe's Daughter," by Jane Gardam

There is a special pleasure in opening a novel and immediately feeling one is in the hands of a master. (Side note: I really wish there were an equivalent, non-gendered term for women, one that did not have the other connotations that the word “mistress” does. Or better still, a gender-neutral term. “Master” is ostensibly gender-neutral nowadays, but it doesn't really feel that way.) There is that leap of recognition and joy at knowing that one can absolutely trust that the pages ahead will be beautifully written and will take the reader on a journey that will be original, that will connect with one’s own experience yet make one see the world in a new way. This is what I have learned to feel when beginning a novel by Jane Gardam. On 3/18/10 I wrote about how terrific her paired novels, “Old Filth” and “The Man in the Wooden Hat” were. I have read some of her other work as well, including her short story collection “The People on Privilege Hill.” I have just finished her “Crusoe’s Daughter,” which was originally published in the U.S. in 1985, has now been reissued (Europa, 2012), and is being reviewed very positively this year. Oh, what a novel! It is the story of Polly Flint, from age six to her current age of 85, and her life in a yellow house on the marshes in rural northern England. An orphan, she is raised by two aunts and a few other adults (a friend who lives with the aunts, a housekeeper, an uncle who comes to visit regularly); she rarely travels away from her beloved house and marshes; she has brushes with love and sex, but never marries. She never goes to school (she is what we would now call home-schooled) but her real education comes through the books in her late grandfather’s library. In particular, throughout her life, her great guiding light is the novel “Robinson Crusoe.” She reads and re-reads it dozens of times, eventually translates it into German and French, and writes about it. More important, she uses it as a source of inspiration, information, strength, and moral guidance. I worry that this plot description in no way does justice to the power and beauty of the story. “Crusoe’s Daughter” is crisply, precisely written, yet sings. It is so engaging that I spent most of a day reading it, a day when I should have been doing other things, but just had to keep reading, not in a page-turner bestseller way, but in the way one feels when one has entered a unique, compelling universe and can’t bear not to stay in it to the end. I haven’t given this designation to a book for a while, but enthusiastically give it to “Crusoe’s Daughter”: Highly recommended!

"Hemingway & Gellhorn": The Film

On Monday evening (5/28/12) I watched “Hemingway & Gellhorn” on HBO. This new film focuses on the two writers' work and relationship during and after the years of the Spanish Civil War. Martha Gellhorn was a great writer and brave war correspondent/reporter in her own right, and the two writers are portrayed in the thick of both the Spanish Civil War and other situations such as a trip to China and secret meetings with Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Madame Chiang, and with Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai). The thrill and danger of wartime and world affairs were part of what attracted the two to each other. There is apparently, for example, nothing like a romantic interlude in a hotel that is being bombed at the time. Although Hemingway admired Gellhorn immensely, was unfaithful to his second wife with her, and then made Gellhorn his third wife, he also sometimes felt competitive with her, and resented her going off to report on wars and other stories around the world. The movie stars Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, both of whom are great actors and did well in this film, but somehow Owen -- whose acting I usually admire admire and enjoy -- didn’t quite capture Hemingway for me. To be fair, this may be because Owen played Hemingway in a more subdued manner than he is usually portrayed, and perhaps this more nuanced portrayal is actually more accurate than the exaggerated one we are used to. Kidman as Gellhorn was brilliant. This movie was directed by Philip Kaufman, who lives and works here in San Francisco. In fact, the whole movie was filmed in the San Francisco Bay Area, with some very creative use of various Bay Area sites to stand in for Spain, Cuba, and China, among other places.