"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."

Manhattan: America's Literary Living Room?

So many American novels are set in New York, and especially Manhattan, that it seems that it is America's -- at least America's literary -- living room. Of course one reason is that many writers live there, or have lived there, or have studied there. And it is, after all, the U. S. center for literature as it is for most arts. (Although many writers live here in San Francisco and surroundings, and there is an active literary scene here, as well as world-class opera, ballet, museums, theater, etc., I have to concede that New York is still the center.) But beyond that, it is a place that most novel readers know; whether or not they live in or regularly visit New York, they have read so many novels set there that they feel they know it. Readers feel we know that long thin borough, with Central Park a long vertical inside a vertical, through the top and middle, and with all the other familiar areas: the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side, Midtown, the Village, Chelsea, Harlem, Morningside Heights, etc., etc. We know Fifth Avenue, the Theater District, Columbus Circle, Times Square, Wall Street, Bryant Park, Rockefeller Center, and many more familiar landmarks. We know about yellow cabs, and doormen buildings, and all the cultural events at the Lincoln Center. We know about the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and the Museum of Natural History. We are very familiar with the campuses of Columbia University and NYU. We know about Zabar's, Dean & Deluca, and Fairway, and we know you can get food delivered to your door from hundreds of restaurants. And we know about the amazing restaurants! So of course we feel comfortable when we pick up a novel set in Manhattan; for readers, it belongs to all of us!

A Smart, Witty, British Site on Books

I recently discovered the Guardian's book section website, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books. What a smart, witty, informative, provocative, and -- oh yes -- British site it is! I like it because it has that British viewpoint, that angle from across the Atlantic. I like it because its authors are witty and sharp. And I like it because it informs me about books from the UK and around the world that I may not have known about otherwise. As with the Booker Prize lists, which I posted about on 9/12/10, the Guardian site opens up my book world.

The Luxuriantly Dark and Moody Thoughts of Youth

When I was 21, I copied the following quote in a notebook; I just ran across it again. It is by Andre Gide, from "The Counterfeiters" (p. 297 in the edition I had at the time). He wrote, "In real life nothing is solved; everything continues. We remain in our uncertainty, and we shall remain to the very end without knowing what to make of things. In the meantime life goes on and on, the same as ever. And one gets resigned to that too, as one does to everything else...as one does to everything." I -- like many young people -- had periods of moodiness, uncertainty, and dramatic pronouncements about the "meaning of life" or lack thereof. I had my existentialist phase. I copied out passages such as the above. Although my feelings were real, there was a certain luxury -- a luxury of youth and obliviousness -- in being able to dwell in such dramatic despair. When I got older, I realized that (unless one has a very hard life, or is clinically depressed, and I do acknowledge that those situations are very different from my relatively easy life, and therefore what I say here may not apply to people in those situations), one should -- I should -- recognize that life is far too precious to waste it on making dark statements about the sameness, dullness, heaviness, meaninglessness of life. Now that I am much older, and much more aware of mortality, those youthful moods and thoughts seem self-indulgent. But I try to be understanding of my younger self, as I was part of a long tradition -- one that included such authors as Gide, Sartre, Hesse, et al -- of such youthful wallowing in unearned despair.

R.I.P. Vance Bourjaily

Do you remember the author Vance Bourjaily? He was quite well-known for his several novels in the years after World War II, especially for his novel about that war, "The End of My Life" (1947), which critic John W. Aldridge (n his 1951 critical study "After the Lost Generation") called "the most neglected but, in many ways, the most promising of the novels published soon after World War II." But for some reason his reputation didn't really catch fire or endure. He did have a distinguished career as a professor of creative writing, most notably at the revered University of Iowa writing program, where he taught for more than 20 years, influencing many many writers. I read a couple of his novels many years ago, and then more or less forgot about him. But when I opened the paper this morning and saw his name in large letters above his obituary, I immediately remembered reading him, and even remembered thinking that his name was very distinctive and rather dashing. The other surprise was finding that not only had he written for the San Francisco Chronicle at one period in his life, but also he had lived the last eight years of his life in San Rafael, California, just a few miles from where I live. Perhaps I have passed him on the street without realizing it...I lift a virtual glass to toast this writer's memory, and hope that his work will stay in print and be enjoyed by readers for years to come.

Unreliable Narrators

We all forget many of the specifics of lectures and discussions in school and college. But we also all experience educational moments that stand out and that we remember over the years. One of my such "aha" moments, one that has stuck with me these many years, occurred in a college class on the 19th Century British novel. We were discussing "Wuthering Heights," and the professor asked if we could always be sure the narrator of a novel was reliable, was telling the exact truth. I remember we all looked at him rather blankly, and finally he had to gently lead us to apprehend the idea that often authors would purposely create unreliable narrators whose viewpoints affected the way they told the story, even to the extent of -- consciously or unconsciously -- withholding or distorting the "truth." (Of course the question of whether there is any one "truth" is a huge one in academe, far too big to tackle here!) Our professor helped us see that Nelly Dean, the housekeeper who narrated much of the story in "Wuthering Heights," was limited in her knowledge, and also had an interest in presenting events a certain way. I remember this came to me as news; I guess I -- and apparently my classmates -- thought of the narrator as a sort of straightforward, unbiased conveyor of the events in a novel. Such a belief was obviously the product of youth and naivete. I thank my professor for that moment of being startled into questioning, of suddenly seeing literature in a new way.

A Male Writer on Bias Against Women Writers

I have occasionally addressed the issue of whether or not there is now equality of the genders in the world of literature, most recently on 8/26/10 (writing about A.S. Byatt's contention that smart women writers are not welcomed) and on 9/4/10 (writing on the assertion made by some women writers that the New York Times Book Section is a "Boys' Club"). Now a well-respected male writer who lives partly in India and partly in the UK, Pankaj Mishra, writing about American literature, states that "the ruthless regularity with which white women novelists along with short-story writers, poets and essayists are excluded from the canon of 'great American writers' (long after the writers so beatified ceased to be readable) ought to make us suspicious." (The reason he specifies "white" women is that he believes "stories of ethnic minorities assimilating into American society" -- presumably by women writers of color as well as men -- are respected by the literary establishment.) Mishra writes of being asked by a reader in India to make up a list of the best American literature, and of finding that he rejected many of the "great" male authors for his list. He says, "Much of the American fiction I chose – for its formal and political daring, and, yes, universal implications – turned out to have been authored by white women writers, many of them virtuosos of short fiction. My list included Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick and Carson McCullers as well as such contemporary practitioners as Shirley Hazzard, Deborah Eisenberg, Jane Smiley, Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan" ("Pankaj Mishra on American Literature.” The Guardian, 9/11/10, http:www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/11/).