"Pulse"

"Pulse" (2011) is an apt title for a collection of short stories that has its finger on the pulse of the (mostly) contemporary, (mostly) English characters in these very readable stories by the esteemed English writer, Julian Barnes. Representative of these educated, liberal, witty, self-aware characters are those recurring in the four very enjoyable "At Phil & Joanna's" stories, which consist almost entirely of lively, entertaining dinner party conversations. But the stories that most appealed to me, and will linger in my mind, are contemporary but with roots in the characters' pasts. For example, the two aging female novelists in the story "Sleeping with John Updike" are both resilient and canny, and both support and are critical of each other; they help each other survive and prosper, in a modest, low-key way, with only a few regrets, bravely borne. The best and most touching story is the last one, "Pulse," with its portrayal of the narrators' parents and their long and loving marriage. Their undramatic but rock solid and tender love for each other is the narrator's inspiration, yet makes his own failed marriage a sad contrast. But also inspiring and lovely is his great regard and love for his parents, and all he learns from them about love, courage, and grace...truly the "pulse" of life at its best.

"The Easter Parade"

In 1999, Stewart O’Nan (author of “Emily, Alone,” which I posted about yesterday) wrote of his great admiration for the late author Richard Yates, and of his concern that Yates’ books were less and less read. I share O’Nan’s concern, and I hope that the 2008 movie version of Yates’ great novel, “Revolutionary Road,” has drawn some readers to further explore his novels. I have just listened to the CD version of another of his novels, “The Easter Parade” (originally published 1976; audio version BBC Audiobooks America, 2009), and found it a very sad but powerful and insightful story. It tells of two sisters, Sarah and Emily, over much of their lifetimes; we learn of the story from Emily’s perspective. The girls’ father is a sad character who loves the girls but is destroyed by alcohol and depression and dies young; their mother lives much longer but the girls soon have to take care of her as much as she does them, and she too is felled by alcoholism. The family curse continues in both the daughters. Sarah marries and has children; she stays with her husband even though he abuses her, and takes refuge in drinking. Emily is the “free spirit,” loving and living with a series of men but never “settling down”; she too drinks too much. She is independent, always working, but a combination of alcohol, being left by a lover, and losing a job leave her in a vulnerable and sad position in her late middle age. The story is often grim, yet somehow there are sporadic times of optimism and even happiness throughout as well. Although the two women have less than optimal lives, Sarah has her family, and Emily has her independence and her lovers, and although they are very different in some ways, and don’t see each other often as adults, they have each other as well. The two women have a family bond that lasts, that forms a lifelong underpinning to their lives. Yates has much to show us about the difficulties of life, about the reasons people turn to drink, and about the destruction caused by alcohol. But he also seems to be telling us that no matter how difficult life gets, the thing that can -- if we are lucky -- buoy us up and connect us to the world is family.

"Emily, Alone"

Who can resist a novel that begins with the following epigraph from Virginia Woolf (from “To the Lighthouse”): “Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life -- startling, unexpected, unknown?”? Not I, certainly. Actually, I chose to read this book, “Emily, Alone” (Viking, 2011), even before seeing this wonderful epigraph, when I heard the author, Stewart O’Nan, interviewed on the radio. I love the idea that the book is about an older woman, and that the author’s goal was to truly portray the texture and details of the day-to-day life of this woman. And he does so in a manner both realistic and engaging. Often writers writing about older people write condescendingly, but O'Nan does not. A person of a different age (fifty) and gender (male), O’Nan reminds us that literature springs from the imagination, and writers are not only capable of writing about those like themselves in the obvious forms of identity. Actually, this is not so much a book about an older woman as a book about an interesting and interested woman who happens to be aging, and figuring out what this phase of her life will be like. What is impressive is that she doesn’t allow herself to accept a smaller world, now that her husband has died and her grown children live far away. She enjoys the small pleasures of living alone and having fewer responsibilities, but she also rises to the challenge when her sister-in-law becomes ill, beginning to drive again (something that she had given up) and staying involved in the larger world. Nothing very dramatic happens in this novel, but there is great reading pleasure to be had in observing and savoring the events in Emily’s current life, what she thinks about them, and how she responds to them. I loved reading this novel, and the character of Emily will stay in my mind for a long time. Highly recommended.

Making a Dent in My Magazine Pile

The daunting “magazine pile” that has built up during this busy semester and that I posted about on 4/6/11 was getting taller and taller, but just recently, as my semester winds down, I have made a conscious effort to make a serious dent in this pile. I have had some success. A couple of evenings ago, I separated out all the Nation magazines, which I enjoy and learn so much from, but which come rather unrelentingly every week, making it hard to keep up with them. I decided to read the tables of content of these 8-9 back issues, and just read a few selected articles in each issue that I was particularly interested in. I did so, and was able to polish off the pile in one long evening. Another evening I did the same thing with the four San Francisco magazines that had accumulated, and with a couple of other magazines of which I had two or more issues waiting. Then another evening, I powered through five back issues of Vanity Fair (which normally don’t pile up like that, as they are so much fun to read!). And finally, I staged a sort of mop-up operation of all the strays, including magazines that are from organizations I belong to and that are often rather boring, but that I hate to recycle without paging through to make sure I am not missing anything. I do keep up with the New Yorkers and New Yorks, so they were up to date already. And voila: my magazine pile was down to just two magazines! And then today two more arrived in the mail.... I love my magazines, but I have to keep on top of them, or there will be another pile rising on the shelf before I know it. And there is still the pile of professional journals awaiting my attention .... That’s my next project....

"My Ruby Slippers"

I’ve had the pleasure of hearing excerpts from my USF colleague Tracy Seeley’s new book over the years she was writing it; for example, she gave a very moving in-progress reading from it when she was the USF NEH chair. Now I have had the pleasure of reading the book itself. “My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas” (University of Nebraska, 2011) is a mixture of memoir, cancer journal, travelogue, environmental essay, reflections on place, and much more. Seeley’s family moved often when she was a child, and her parents’ marriage was difficult and complicated. She decided a few years ago to revisit the places her family had lived, and in particular to reacquaint herself with Kansas. After years in San Francisco, she realized that she had suppressed the Kansas part of her life and its imprint on her, and had even acquiesced to the belief common among many San Franciscans that all culture and beauty is on the coasts and not in the heartlands. In the course of several visits to Kansas, she confronts her feelings about her father and about moving so often, is reminded of all she loved about Kansas, and discovers new reasons to value and cherish it. Because she gave herself several years to absorb these experiences and her epiphanies about them, and to think and read and write about them and their contexts, this book has great depth, breadth, richness, and complexity. All the strands of the author’s background, her relationships, her experiences, her reading, her activism, and her passions (for teaching, for literature, for her family, for her husband, for the environment, for nature, for gardening, for meditation) influence each other and inform this wonderfully thoughtful book. Seeley also writes beautifully. “Ruby Slippers” is –- although sad and difficult in parts -- a pleasure to read. It is also a book that –- as befitting a publication from the lifelong educator that the author has been -- teaches readers much about our own relationships with the places we live, our families, our health, nature, literature, and love in all its varieties.

O, London!

As readers know, I am an ambivalent but devoted Anglophile. So I truly savored "A Symposium on London" in the Spring 2011 issue of The Threepenny Review (a periodical that I posted about on 3/14/10). In the "symposia" frequently published in that quarterly, various authors are asked to write about a given topic, and the contributions are varied, original, and often surprising; it is always a pleasure to read them. The current symposium is no exception...what a trove of riches! James Lasdun writes of coming home from boarding school to his family's house in Notting Hill Gate, just as the "flowering hippie culture" blossomed. Robert Pinsky tells the story of his year in London in the early 1970s, which was, "for a young American of my generation...like living in the past...the houses seemed like survivals from nineteenth-century fiction." Anne Wagner, living in London now, mourns what she perceives as the homogenization of London, and concludes that she is "going to have to settle for an imaginary London, artificially built up" out of bits and pieces of current and former aspects of the city. James Campbell, a Scot, writes about how he gradually came to identify himself as a Londoner, partly through his exciting discovery that Robert Louis Stevenson had lived in the same neighborhood that Campbell did. Wendy Steiner fondly remembers her three years in London in the 1980s as "a time of continual, uncanny exhilaration...." For her, "All those literary palaces and parks and seedy alleys that filled my imagination -- Baker Street, Kensington Gardens, Whitehall, the Strand -- now filled the literal fog of afternoon walks....The nightingales we heard on Hampstead Heath were Keats's nightingales, and the gathering shadows on the Heath took on a touch of the sublime as we recited Blake's 'Tyger'...." And Dee Shulman concludes her piece as follows: "I still wake up every morning and giggle with delight at the sheer bloody deliciousness of our fabulous, filthy, noisy, beautiful, scary, wildly exuberant London."

Sex, Marriage, and War

How important is sex in marriage and other romantic relationships? What happens when all the women in a New Jersey town find themselves under a spell that makes them averse to sex? In “The Uncoupling” (Riverhead, 2011), by Meg Wolitzer, the local high school puts on the ancient Aristophanes play, “Lysistrata,” about how the Greek women stopped having sex, hoping to pressure their men to end the war through a kind of sex strike. Somehow this classic play precipitates a current real life echo in the town of Stellar Plains. Especially affected are the formerly “ideal couple,” two popular teachers at the high school married to each other, Dory and Robby; this couple always thought their love and sexual life would last forever. Their teenaged daughter Willa (yes, named for the writer!), in the midst of her very first romance, is also affected by the spell. The novel is light and amusing, but also explores serious issues about sex, love, marriage, relationships, family, and more. It also resonates, without dwelling too heavily on this aspect, on the level of people wanting to do something, anything, to end the wars the U.S. is currently engaged in. Hmmm....could such a strike work today? (I know, I know...this requires all sorts of sexist assumptions about who is for war and who is against it, which I do not want to promulgate....but just for the sake of speculation....)