RIP Edward Albee

The playwright Edward Albee died today (Sept. 16, 2016), at the age of 88. The New York Times (9/16/16) calls him the “playwright of a desperate generation.” Albee said about his own plays that they were about “people missing the boat,…coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done.” His most famous play was the wrenching story of a bitterly confrontational marriage, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (later made into the unforgettable 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton). Other plays included “The Zoo Story” and “A Delicate Balance.” Although I don’t think I have read his plays since college, and have only attended his plays in the theater once or twice over the years, I have always admired Albee’s work, and he has been a huge presence on the arts scene for fifty-plus years. Albee’s goal, he said, was for his audiences to be “challenged to confront situations and ideas outside their comfort zone,” and that he surely achieved.

Craving Narrative for Comfort

Besides loving, and reading copious quantities of, literature (and studying it and teaching it) over many years, I have a parallel, intertwined craving for narrative, for story. Literature is much more than story, of course, and I appreciate all that is involved in that “much more.” But at the base of it all, perhaps, is that need for story. Sometimes so much so that it becomes a bit separated from “literature” in its highest manifestation, and becomes a sort of provider of entertainment, distraction and comfort. Especially when one is – OK, when I am – stressed, worried, or “down,” a kind of “medicine” is a direct application of large doses of story, well written but not “great literature.” Some of the novels in this category that I read are ones that I don’t usually post about here. Not that there is anything wrong with them, or reading them. To the contrary. But the way I consume them is not with deep thought, and sometimes I can’t remember much about them after I read them. They serve a purpose, but are not necessarily important for me to share my thoughts about. They still have to be well crafted; I don’t completely turn off my critical faculties when reading them. But I am less demanding, and looking for something a little bit different, than when I am reading recognized literary fiction. Some of the providers of story, and the comfort that comes with such novels, that I have been reading lately (at a time when a family member is quite sick) are written by such popular (for a reason!) authors as Jane Green, Emily Giffin, Elin Hildebrand, Jodi Picoult, and Anita Shreve. I thank these and other authors for the enjoyment they provide, and for the time away from worry that they offer.

"Invincible Summer," by Alice Adams

It is strange for me to write about a novel by an Alice Adams, when the Alice Adams isn’t the gifted one I have read for so many years. That first Alice Adams was a San Francisco writer, now no longer with us, who wrote sparkling and astute fiction about women who were generally prosperous, liberal, and artistic. The Alice Adams whose novel “Invincible Summer” (Little, Brown, 2016) I have just read is half Australian, lives in England, and is writing now, unlike the earlier Alice Adams, who wrote her many novels and short story collections (and published often in The New Yorker) mainly in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. But after I made the transition to the “new” Alice Adams, I quite enjoyed this novel about four friends in England, a novel that follows them from their college years in the early 1990s until they are in their early forties in 2015. The post-college years of Eva, Benedict, Sylvie, and Lucien (Sylvie’s brother) diverge, and sometimes they grow apart for years at a time, but they always reconnect. There are romances, marriages, children, good jobs and not-so-good jobs, wealth and poverty, drugs and music, deaths of family members, and all the other things that can and do happen to young people growing into the adulthood of “real life.” This aspect of the story reminds me of the novel I posted about on 8/23/16 that concerned itself with a similar theme -- young people's facing the fact of actual adulthood and all that that condition brings with it -- although in New York City in that case. It is of course an eternal theme, but perhaps experienced more self-consciously in recent decades. My favorite part about the book is the part that is always my favorite: the relationships among friends and family members, and all their twists and turns.

Books as Symbols of Our Lives

Books can symbolize so much, even in the small events of everyday life. Let me give you an example. A couple of days ago, I went to my department office to check my mailbox, and found three books there. One was a book I had lent a new colleague, and she was returning; this symbolized to me the give and take, the mentoring and collegiality, of our department and of my colleagues. The second was an academic book that had been sent to me by the publisher as a thank-you for having reviewed the book proposal and sample chapters for that book, a couple of years ago. This symbolized the service we academics all do for our professional communities, a way to contribute to the larger academic work we engage in. The third was not actually a book, but a copy of a book cover, plus an acknowledgements page, left there for me by a USF colleague in a different department (Philosophy), one with whom I had written regularly during the fall semester, when he was finishing up his book, of which he has just received a preview copy. During breaks from writing, we had talked quite a bit about our respective projects, and I particularly remember discussing his proposed title, with which he was struggling. He was kind enough to include me in his acknowledgements, about which I felt pleased and honored. This cover and page symbolized the faculty writing culture at my university, and the rich and enjoyable collegial relationships I have with many faculty members in different departments there. Something about the confluence of finding these three books at the same time in my mailbox reminded me of the wonderful web of professional and personal connections I have at my university and elsewhere, and for a moment I savored that feeling and thought about how fortunate I am to be doing this kind of work I love: teaching, researching, writing, reviewing, working with colleagues and students both at my institution and all over the country and world.

"Break in Case of Emergency," by Jessica Winter

Jessica Winter has a very fresh, very distinctive voice, as evidenced in her debut novel, “Break in Case of Emergency” (Knopf, 2016). There are three intertwining topics or themes (although the novel is only a tiny bit didactic, and mostly an unusual mixture of the satirical and the touching). First and foremost it is a novel about what it is like to realize, as one approaches and enters one’s thirties, that one is now irrevocably an adult. Friends Jen, Meg, and Pam were best friends in college and after, and still are, but their lives are diverging in some ways. Jen finds that her friends, whose money didn’t mean much when they were all in the same boat in college and starting off in New York, are now cushioned by family money in a way that publicist Jen and her teacher husband Jim are far from experiencing. Second, Jen is working for a sort of vanity philanthropy, in which a rich woman is using her huge divorce settlement to play at female-empowerment through her hazily focused, New Ageish foundation that is pretty much all talk and no action. Winter’s portrayal of the celebrity philanthropist, Leora Infinitas (not her original name, you will not be surprised to hear), is a very funny caricature; some of her minions are equally outrageously over the top. Jen of course sees through it all, but needs the job. The third theme is, in deep contrast to the parody of the second, very serious, touching, and at times sad: Jen and Jim are attempting to have a child, but experience both infertility and miscarriage. As with so many coming-of-age-in-New-York stories (and there are SO many of those), the city is not only a backdrop but almost a character in its own right, as I have observed about other New York-based fiction, most recently on 8/17/16. The real pleasure of this novel is, as I started off by saying, the author’s voice and style, which feels true, and yet humorous, and yet wistful, and yet again filled with pizazz that grabs the reader’s attention.

"The Believers" and "A Perfectly Good Family": Two Novels about Families

I have a small backlog of novels to report on, so here for a change I will give just a short (even shorter than usual!) summary of two of them that, despite very different settings, have common themes of families after the death of parent(s), and the squabbles and yet love expressed by the very diverse adult children in each case. First, “The Believers” (Harper Perennial, 2008), by Zoe Heller, tells the story of what happens when leftist lawyer Joel Litvinoff has a stroke, goes into a coma, and eventually -- but only after a long, drawn-out time in the hospital -- dies. His feisty (okay, sometimes downright mean and rude) wife Audrey and his three very different adult children (with very different beliefs, thus the title) are both drawn together and divided. The characters are understandable and very fallible, and sometimes not very likeable (I have discussed the topic of unlikeable characters several times, most recently on 8/12/16). There is much angst, family drama, and interpersonal strife. The city of New York is not only the setting but a kind of additional character in the novel. Second, “A Perfectly Good Family” (Harper Perennial, 2007), by Lionel Shriver (who is, by the way, a female writer), is also about a family drawn together and yet separated by the death of parents, in this case both parents, also lefties but of a more liberal stripe. There are also three adult children who live very different lives but now have to make decisions together, especially about their parents’ grand historical house. Sell it? Share it? Or…? As they gather in the house to take care of their parents’ financial and other matters, and to decide about the house, all the old childhood differences and dramas, stemming from their very unlike relationships with their parents, resurface. In this case the setting is North Carolina, a very different background than the New York of “The Believers,” so there is a little bit of the heaviness of Southern history, and a touch of Southern Gothic atmosphere, as a backdrop to the story. The strength of both these novels is the portrayals of the family dynamics, which definitely keep the reader’s attention. There are side stories in each, including descriptions of spouses and other characters, and revelations about good and bad behaviors, but the families, their histories, and their interactions are the main focus.

"She Poured Out Her Heart," by Jean Thompson

I used to think I liked Jean Thompson’s fiction. My liking wavered a bit when I read “The Humanity Project” (about which I posted on 5/17/13). I have just finished reading her most recent book, “She Poured Out Her Heart” (Blue Rider Press, 2016), and although this novel mostly kept my attention, I found myself needing to take a break from it from time to time, and by the time I finished, I realized that for some reason I just didn’t particularly like the novel. It is quite well written, and the characters are well drawn. The plot has enough “mystery” that it draws the reader forward. Maybe the problem is that I didn’t like the characters much, although there were reasons to be sympathetic with each of them, and one of them (Bonnie) is more sympathetic than the others. This is an issue I – and many others – have often discussed: do we need to “like” characters in order to admire a novel? The answer is pretty clearly “no,” although sometimes in real life reading (as opposed to intellectual discussion of reading), it may feel otherwise. Or maybe I didn’t like the novel very much because the characters were presented in a complex-but-still-somehow-flat manner (a stylistic matter?)? Maybe it was a distaste for some of their behavior, even though the behavior is not out of the norm for contemporary novels, or truly outrageous, and even though the author shows us quite clearly the roots and causes of those behaviors in a way that should make readers sympathetic to them? The four main characters (all in their late thirties except for Patrick, who is a few years younger) are Jane, Bonnie, Eric, and Patrick. Jane and Bonnie have been best friends since college, and are very close although very different. Jane has lived a more traditional, expected life, with marriage to a doctor, two young children, and a nice house in a nice area of Chicago. Bonnie has never settled down, is hooked on the adrenaline and excitement of constantly revolving relationships with men who are attractive losers; even her job flirts with danger, as she works advising police in crisis situations involving people on the edge of explosion, such as hostage takers and armed suicide-threateners. She likes to think of herself as nontraditional, a rule breaker, a person who does what she wants, led by passion, rather than what society expects, but she finds at some points that this ideal and reality do not always coincide. Eric is Jane’s physician husband, who tries hard to be a good husband and father, yet can’t figure out how to deal with Jane’s problems, and is sometimes a little too quick to take the easy way out. Patrick, a handsome and sweet-talking bartender, is one of Bonnie’s loser-type lovers. The plot involves Jane’s unhappiness and emotional/mental health problems, Bonnie’s attempt to help, Eric’s attempts to cope, and Patrick’s increasing prominence in the tangled relationships of the other characters. Thompson is very good in examining complex emotions, the ways in which we are all inconsistent and even hypocritical in our behaviors, and the ways we justify those inconsistencies and questionable behaviors, behaviors that are both self-destructive and betrayals of our closest connections. I admire the psychological insights. And I understand the motivations of the characters. I actually admire the book on several levels; I just don’t like it very much. Perhaps what I react negatively to is an element of subtle creepiness I felt, although I can’t really back up this assertion clearly. Maybe -- probably -- it is just a simple matter of personal taste in reading matter. I write about it here because it is an example of something that happens fairly rarely to me: admiring and liking a writer to the extent of putting her high on my list of “must get every new title” authors, and then over time changing my impressions and preferences enough to feel I probably will not read more of this author’s fiction. This sometimes happens with authors I liked many years ago and then changed my mind about as I got older, but not often with those I seriously liked within the past decade.