"The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories," by Don DeLillo

I must start by saying that I have not read any of Don DeLillo's acclaimed novels. Somehow they didn't sound like "my kind of" novels, although I would likely admire them in an abstract way. I thought of them as being among the the rather arid, experimental fictions that I mostly avoid. But something about the reviews of "The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories" (Scribner, 2011) made me decide to read it. The stories are much more accessible than I expected. But what floored me was that they do what the best fiction does: they create a cracklingly electric world, one both startingly original and yet hair-raisingly recognizable. Not all the stories made me feel this way, but the best of them did. "Midnight in Dostoevsky" and "Hammer and Sickle" are both mesmerizing. But the most amazing experience was reading the title story, "The Angel Esmeralda." Bleak, searing, gripping, incantatory are all adjectives that come to mind. The story features two elderly nuns, Gracie and Edgar, who regularly visit the worst blasted-out landscapes and tenements of the Bronx, bringing food to the unfortunate, the alienated, the drug-addicted. We experience the events of the story through the consciousness of the older of the nuns, Edgar. The author's descriptions of the setting are other-worldly and intensely disturbing. Yet somehow in all of this there are notes of hope. The two nuns have caught glimpses of a young girl, Esmeralda, apparently living by her wits, perhaps in one of the stripped down carcasses of automobiles; they try to catch her to help her, but she is elusive. Something terrible happens, but out of the tragedy, an improbable sort of miracle happens as well. This story was one that gave me shivers. I think that I now need to go back and read some of DeLillo's novels....

The Kindle Dilemma

I have not been a friend or advocate of e-readers (Kindles, Nooks, and others), fearing that they signal the diminishment of, and perhaps eventually even the end of, my beloved "real" books, books with pages and covers. But I have been persuaded by many friends and family members that they are useful for travel, useful for getting books immediately on demand, etc. My daughter recently said, "Mom, I have to tell you something you won't like," causing me a flash of worry, until she mischievously continued, "I got a Kindle!" In her case, she uses it for commuting to her job downtown on public transportation, as well as for her frequent travel by air, and finds the Kindle easy to carry and use in those situations. I continue to resist getting one myself, but I am not protesting them as vehemently as I used to, as I foresee that eventually it will be one of those items that "everyone" has, and eventually I will probably succumb and get one. In matters of technology, I am usually a "late adopter," and will be so for this device as for others in the past. At that point I will have to "eat my words." So I am now, with sadness and apprehension, stopping (at least most of the time!) speaking out against them. Now I can only hope that the e-reader and the traditional book will continue to co-exist, each having its advantages and its uses at different times and in different situations. (But why do I feel somewhat sorrowful and defeated as I type this post...?)

A Backlog of "Nation" Magazines

I love the Nation magazine, as I wrote here on 2/7/11, but because the issues come every week, they tend to pile up. As I said in my post of 4/6/11 about my "magazine pile," New York and The New Yorker also come every week, but I usually read them more quickly. The Nation, although it is important to me, is a bit heavier, more demanding, more serious, more earnest, more political than the other two. I admire and value it very much, I learn much from it, and I get information and ideas from it that I don't get elsewhere. But in general it is not something I eagerly pick up for pure enjoyment the way I do the other two magazines, and several others I subscribe to that arrive (thankfully!) less frequently. Today I noticed that almost three months of back issues of The Nation had piled up, so despite my waiting piles of papers to grade, I set aside a couple of hours to plow through -- and I mean PLOW through -- these backlogged issues. I admit I skipped and skimmed a fair amount, especially as some of the articles were no longer timely. But I thoroughly enjoyed my immersion in the Nation, and felt I had achieved something by powering through the whole pile. Whew!

What They Were Reading in Muncie Over 100 Years Ago

There's a fascinating essay in the 11/27/11 New York Times Book Review about the recent discovery in Muncie, Indiana, of old handwritten Muncie Public Library records. A researcher "discovered crumbling ledgers and notebooks identifying every book checked out of the library, as well as the name of the patron who checked it out, from November 1891 to December 1902." What a treasure trove! The researchers cataloged and digitized the information, with the resulting database providing "one of the few authoritative records of American reading." Some of what they found: "Women read romances, kids read pulp and white-collar workers read mass-market titles. Horatio Alger was by far the most popular author....Louisa May Alcott is the only author who remains both popular and literary today....The remaining authors at the top of the list...have vanished from memory." Some read the "classics," but not many. This is all not so very different from today....

Buy Holiday Gifts at Independent Bookstores!

I would like to urge readers, as I did last year, to buy as many as possible of your holiday gifts in independent bookstores. Books make great gifts, and we need to support our wonderful independent bookstores.

On another note: I have been posting less the past couple of weeks, as it has been a very busy time at work; in addition, I was finishing two articles with deadlines. I will be back to more frequent posting soon. Thanks for checking and reading the blog!

"The Marriage Plot," by Jeffrey Eugenides

Why I Have Just Read “The Marriage Plot” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), by Jeffrey Eugenides:

1. I was intrigued by the originality of, and liked reading, the author’s two earlier novels, “The Virgin Suicides” and “Middlesex.”
2. It had been nine years since the author’s last novel, “Middlesex,” was published, so there was much anticipation of this new novel.
3. As I said in my 11/13/11 post, there has been much speculation about whether “The Marriage Plot” is based on the author’s real-life famous writer friends; is it a roman a clef? And if so, which character is “really” which writer friend? I am certainly not immune to this kind of literary speculation (gossip?).
4. I am a pushover for novels about a group of friends in college (or elsewhere) and how their ensuing lives and relationships play out in the years after college. In the case of this novel, the characters meet at Brown University; the novel focuses on the college years and on the eventful year immediately after they graduate.
5. Most of all, the title is irresistible to me; it refers to the common plot of Regency and Victorian novels, especially those by women writers such as Austen and Eliot. One of the main characters, Madeleine, is a classic English major type, enchanted and absorbed by the joys, complexities, and insights provided by literature, and eager to pursue a career of scholarship in English literature. This is a very familiar “type” for me! Soon Madeleine is involved in her own “marriage plot,” but it is very different from those in her beloved novels. How does this plot play out in our current culture? In the old novels, marriage often (with the notable exception of Eliot’s “Middlemarch”) concluded the stories; nowadays we want to know what happens AFTER marriage as well.

I was not disappointed by the novel. (Sometimes a novel that is hyped this much is a disappointment.) I was immediately caught up in it, from the first page, which consisted of a cataloging of the books in Madeleine’s room, including those by Wharton, James, Dickens, Trollope, Austen, Eliot, the Brontes, H.D., Levertov, and Colette. (Madeleine’s bookshelf looks a lot like mine....) The three main characters, with their complicated relationships, as well as the supporting cast of fellow students, parents, professors, and employers, are recognizable and compelling; the plot turns are both believable and at times surprising; the writing is engaging.

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Fifty Years On

It is hard to believe that it has been just under 50 years since Ken Kesey's novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was published in 1962. As an article by James Wolcott in the December 2011 issue of Vanity Fair points out, this novel "helped father the 60s counterculture." I, like a large portion of the Baby Boomer generation, well remember the huge impact of this novel, and of the film version that followed. Who could forget the way the mental hospital represented all the institutions in society that repressed and oppressed people, especially rebels and those who were a bit "different"? Who could forget the standoff between Randle Patrick McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, and Nurse Ratched, played by Louise Fletcher? Wolcott goes on to note that in January, Viking will publish a 50th-anniversary edition of the novel, and speculates that it "may inspire a whole new generation of agitators." A few months ago, I would have dismissed this last clause as hyperbole, but given the recent "Occupy" movement's rapid growth, and the great breadth and depth of outrage it represents, those words sound prescient.