Great Biographies of Great Writers

Great biographies of great writers have a double whammy value: They are about wonderful writers that we care about; in addition, the best biographies are well written and sometimes become classics themselves. I was thinking about this the other day while talking with my friend B, a great admirer of Henry James. B spoke of what a masterpiece the Leon Edel five-volume biography of James was. I started thinking of other great bios of writers, and came up with the following as outstanding examples. One of the first such bios I was completely engrossed by was Michael Holroyd's "Lytton Strachey: A Biography." Of course that book was enhanced by its stories of the Bloomsbury group. And speaking of the Bloomsbury group, Quentin Bell's biography of his aunt, "Virginia Woolf: A Biography" is another classic. This book, like many of the classic bios, was found by later scholars to be somewhat biased and incomplete, but to me this doesn't subtract from the power of these great portrayals. Another and even older favorite of mine is Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Life of Charlotte Bronte." Gaskell and Bronte were contemporaries and knew each other, and as fellow female novelists, understood much about each other. Readers of that bio might want to read Winnifred Gerin's "Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography." Claire Tomalin wrote the wonderful "Jane Austen: A Life," and R.W.B. Lewis wrote the terrific and slightly scandalous "Edith Wharton: A Biography." Although I don't believe one needs to know about a writer's life to appreciate her or his works, I -- like many readers -- am curious about the lives of my favorite authors, and have valued and enjoyed the great biographies listed above.

"Perfect Reader"? Not Really.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised that I picked up the novel, "Perfect Reader" (Pantheon, 2010), by Maggie Pouncey, at the library mainly on the basis of the alluring title, along with a quick perusal of the jacket verbiage. Perfect title, right? Perhaps my expectations were unreasonably high, but I was somewhat disappointed. Upon her famous critic and scholar father's death, the main character, Flora, finds she has been appointed his literary executor. Because of her parents' divorce and other problems, she has been somewhat distant from her father in recent years, but -- apparently on a whim and because she is not happy with her job anyway -- she goes "home" to Darwin, the small college town where she grew up, and where her father lived and taught. She camps out in his house -- now hers -- and dithers about what to do about a cache of poetry he wrote in his last year. When the poetry turns out to be about his new lover, one that Flora had not been aware of, her ambivalence about her father, about the poems, and about her role as his daughter and his literary executor increases. She seems to be paralyzed by indecision about whether to publish the poems, not to mention what she should do with the rest of her own life, and although she is perhaps meant to be a sympathetic character, I found her annoyingly passive and preoccupied with her own not very earthshaking dilemmas. The writing is fine, and the novel kept me reading, but I finished it with a "so what" shrug.

On Forgetting What We Read

On 2/24/10, I posted on the problem of forgetting the contents of many of the books we read. Several friends have told me they have this problem, and I often do as well. My newest rationalization of this phenomenon is that those of us who read a lot have too much to keep track of and therefore are more likely to forget what we read than people who only read a couple of books a year. Self-serving reasoning, no? I was pleased to see in last Sunday's (9/19/10) New York Times Book Review an essay by James Collins (author of the charming novel "Beginner's Greek," which I recommend) titled "The Plot Escapes Me." He ruefully reflects on the fact that he forgets much of what he reads, and then wryly asks the question, "Why read books if we can't remember what's in them?" He seeks professional expertise from Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development and author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain." She reassures Collins -- and by extension, us -- that "I totally believe that you are a different person for having read [his latest book read]," and continues by saying that reading creates pathways in the brain, strengthening different mental processes. She says that "we can't retrieve the specifics" of books we read, "but to adapt a phrase of William James's, there is a wraith of memory." I very much like the phrase "a wraith of memory" and find it resonates with my own experience. Wolf concludes by saying, again reassuringly, that "It's there [in our brains]. You are the sum of it all." Thank you, James Collins, for raising this question, and thank you, Maryanne Wolf, for your answers.

"A Gate at the Stairs"

Seeing that "A Gate at the Stairs," by Lorrie Moore, originally published in 2009,is now in paperback (from Vintage Contemporaries) gives me an opportunity to recommend this wonderful novel. Moore, best known as a short story writer, has written a thoroughly engaging coming-of-age story about a Midwestern college student, Tassie Keltjin, who is hired as a nanny for a mixed-race child even before the child is adopted. Tassie is naive, finding her way in life, being exposed to many new ideas and people at her liberal arts college; her experiences both at college and with the family she nannies for, as well as her expanding awareness of the larger world during the events of 9/11, contribute to her rapid maturing during this period. Tassie is often lonely, as is her employer Sarah, and there are some sad parts of the novel, as well as times of pleasure and enlightenment. Tassie is a very believable and likeable character, and the novel is both serious and often humorous, and very readable. Moore is -- as I am far from the first to note -- a terrific writer, and this novel is a gift to readers.

The Alices

As I was typing my post on 9/23/10, I started to type Alice McDermott's name but accidentally typed "Alice Hoffman" instead. I immediately realized my mistake and corrected it, but it reminded me of how many contemporary authors there are with the first name Alice. There's one of my very favorite writers, Canadian writer Alice Munro (whom I posted about on 7/22/10); Munro is considered by many to be the greatest short story writer alive, and a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. There is the above-mentioned novelist Alice McDermott, who writes about Irish-American Catholic families in Long Island and Brooklyn. There's Alice Hoffman, also mentioned above, whose novels often include a touch of magic. There is the womanist/feminist, activist, African-American writer Alice Walker (whom I wrote about here on 5/26/10). There's Alice Sebold, author of the haunting novel "The Lovely Bones." And although she died a few years ago, I want to pay tribute to novelist and short story writer Alice Adams, who lived in and wrote about San Francisco; I felt I "knew" the neighborhoods and the women she wrote about. Consider this post an ode of gratitude to these fine writers, these Alices, whose fiction has given me such pleasure.

Distracted by Voices...Then Not

On 2/6/10 I wrote about enjoying audio books while driving. I mentioned one of my favorite readers, Flo Gibson, who has read dozens of books on tape. At first I didn't like her gravelly voice, but I got used to it and then fond of it. I was reminded of this a few days ago when I started listening to Alice McDermott's novel "After This," read by Martha Plimpton, whom I like and respect as an actor. But her voice as a reader -- at least on this recording -- is rather sibilant, and the "sssssss" and "shhhhhhhhh" sounds were distracting for the first half hour or so. Then, somehow, magically, I started not to notice them any more; they either went away, or I got used to them, as I got absorbed in the novel. Now I am enjoying her reading, and happily looking forward to my commute each day.

"Bitter in the Mouth"

I was mesmerized by Monique Truong's "The Book of Salt" when it came out in 2003. That novel about the Vietnamese cook for writer Gertrude Stein and her lesbian companion Alice B. Toklas was beautifully written. So I was excited when I saw that Truong had published a new novel, "Bitter in the Mouth" (Random House, 2010). This novel is also narrated by, and focuses on, a Vietnamese character, but in this case it is a young woman, Linda, who is adopted at age seven by a couple in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. She grows up in this small Southern town family with the usual -- and some not so usual -- dysfunctions. One of the themes of the book is the importance of family, even unusual families. Her closest family members are her adoptive father, who dies early, and her gay transvestite great uncle, Baby Harper, who is everything to her. By the end of the novel, we find out more about the complicated tangled relationships of her family and of her birth parents. The other main plot strand is Linda's synesthesia; the variety of the syndrome that she has causes words to have tastes. She only tells a very few trusted people about this, and only toward the end of the novel does she realize that she is not the only one with this unusual situation, and that it has a name. The author represents these associations as follows: "What'sgrahamcracker so funnycucumber, Leoparsnip?" Although the author is thereby making us experience Linda's world, I must admit that this got tiresome after awhile. "Bitter in the Mouth" is a rich, original, intriguing novel, and I am glad I read it, but it doesn't quite measure up to "The Book of Salt."