Austen Rocks!

Those who love and appreciate Jane Austen's novels may know that she left a couple of unfinished novels when she died. According to today's (7/15/11) San Francisco Chronicle, the manuscript of one of these unfinished novels, "The Watsons," was just sold at auction for $1.6 million, "triple its highest presale estimate." Many readers -- and I am one of them -- who mourn the fact that Austen only wrote six complete novels have happily read the incomplete novels as well, just to have another little bit of her wonderful writing. I am glad her writing and legacy are still recognized, and in today's world, such recognition is demonstrated not only by huge numbers of readers, legions of films based on the novels, and praise by critics, but also monetarily. Compared to what sports or entertainment stars earn, $1.6 million is paltry, but still.... Go Jane Austen, after all these years!!!

"The Bostons," by Carolyn Cooke

Not much current American fiction addresses social class differences; this perhaps stems from a reluctance, despite all evidence, to discuss the existence of social class differences in the United States. Carolyn Cooke’s short story collection, “The Bostons” (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), is an exception; these stories, mostly set in Boston and Maine, portray characters and settings from a wide variety of social classes. The stories set in Boston tend to feature middle- or upper middle-class characters, albeit sometimes genteelly poorer than they were in the past; the stories set in Maine focus on the working and nonworking poor. (These latter stories remind me a bit of Carolyn Chute’s 1986 book, “The Beans of Egypt, Maine.”) Both worlds are described by Cooke with a sort of clinical precision. She seems less interested in judging or in editorializing than in simple description. (Of course nothing a good author writes is truly ”simple.”). The result is that we as readers are given windows into several worlds, worlds that may be unfamiliar to us. We are challenged to understand people along the whole range of economic and social status. This is, after all, one of the roles of literature. These stories are well written, and the fact that characters from one story occasionally show up briefly in other stories starts to make a web of connections across borders – not only the borders of the stories’ beginnings and endings, but the borders of the characters’ geographic, chronological, and social sites.

More on Tessa Hadley

Yesterday (7/12/11) I wrote about Tessa Hadley’s new novel, “The London Train.” In the back of that novel there are interesting and revealing essays by the author about herself and about the writing of the book; I really appreciate the inclusion of these essays. There is also an annotated list titled “Author’s Picks: Favorite Books.” My pulse always quickens when I see such a list; I am immediately curious to know which books the author cherishes and recommends, whether I have read them, whether they are among my own favorites, and/or whether I need to put them on my “to read” list. This particular list is short (10 titles) but wonderful, including some of my favorites: Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Death of the Heart,” Jean Rhys’ “Wide Sargasso Sea,” Alice Munro’s “The Love of a Good Woman,” Henry James’ “The Golden Bowl,” Colm Toibin’s “The Master," and Rumer Godden’s “Kingfishers Catch Fire.” I am also inspired to consider reading the other books on her list: Jorge Luis Borges’ “Selected Fiction,” J. M. Coetzee’s “Boyhood,” Aharaon Appelfeld’s “To the Land of the Cattails,” and -- especially -- Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus.” I have read others of Mann’s works -- “The Magic Mountain” still exists vividly in my mind these many years after reading it -- but not this one.

"The London Train," by Tessa Hadley

When I first read UK writer Tessa Hadley’s work, I was blown away. Wow! What a discovery! I immediately read her three novels, “Accidents in the Home,” “Everything Will Be All Right,” and “The Master Bedroom,” and continued to be amazed and impressed. I have now just read her newest novel, “The London Train” (Harper Perennial, 2011), and although I still savor her wonderful writing, her insights into her characters, and her sharp wit, I have some mixed feelings about the novel. It tells the story of Paul, a writer, and his family, with a subplot about his young adult daughter’s running away to London. Paul regularly travels on the train from Cardiff to London, and even lives for a brief time with his daughter and her boyfriend in an untidy apartment in a sketchy neighborhood. The second part of the novel introduces the character Cora, who is gradually leaving her husband, living more and more in the house in Cardiff she has inherited from her parents. The two stories merge when the two main characters meet on the London train, and soon begin an affair. I won’t tell you how it ends. Perhaps one reason I have mixed feelings about the book is that I couldn’t really understand Paul’s vague dissatisfaction with his life; he has a good relationship with his wife, and even his daughter’s situation is eventually resolved satisfactorily. He misses living in the city, but this isn’t a big issue. I know I shouldn’t dislike a story because I (somewhat) dislike a character. But my unease with the novel is more than that: there is a sort of vague, unsettled feeling to the story. I do understand that this is probably intended by the author. So my reasons for some slight resistance to this novel are probably my own idiosyncratic ones. What I do find interesting, in this novel as in all her work, is Hadley’s twist on “domestic fiction.” In a 2/26/11 interview in the Guardian UK, she says that she is interested in relationships and families, and does not think “domestic fiction” is a negative label. She thinks it can be, but doesn’t have to be, formulaic. She also discusses why men are often puzzled by women’s interest in such fiction. I still consider Hadley one of the best writers writing today, and I still eagerly look forward to reading anything she writes. I can’t resist, in closing, quoting from another writer I truly admire, Anne Enright, who has said (according to the same Guardian interview) that “Hadley, for all the felicity of her prose style, is an immensely subversive writer.” I like that, because I see that although she writes “domestic fiction” (which I read a lot of myself, and will strongly defend), her stories and characters and ideas are never predictable, and never bound by what is fashionable or what others will think is correct. She is a truly original writer.

Pat Conroy's Summer Reading as a Youth

Yesterday (7/10/11) I wrote about Parade Magazine’s special issue on summer reading. Today I would like to focus on Pat Conroy’s essay in that issue, “The Sweetest Reading Season.” He writes about how his family would go every summer to stay at his grandmother’s cottage on a lake in North Carolina. (Those of us who have had the good fortune to spend parts of our summers at a cottage on a lake can relate to this.) The summer he was 15, he brought seven substantial, classic books to the cottage. These books had been recommended to him by his Jesuit English teacher, a man who thought that, in Conroy’s words, “literature itself was a form of holy orders and that reading could shape and exalt anyone.” (Isn’t that a beautiful statement?) Conroy read these seven books steadily and with great enjoyment, and then passed them on to his mother and his sister. Then the three of them would discuss the books, often on the deck on the lake, watching the sun go down. Conroy says that to this day, he always carries a carefully selected pile of books with him on vacation. (This careful selection of vacation reading resonates with me, as I have written before, and probably resonates with you as well). Here I would like to give tribute to this English teacher, and to all the many, many other English teachers who have encouraged and inspired young people to read good books. What a great influence these teachers, as well as other teachers and adults in young people’s lives, have had when they have given the gift of the world of books. Oh, and in case you were wondering what the seven books were, here is the list: Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” and Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” We may or may not have chosen that exact list of books, but it is definitely a good one for a start. What a rich, wonderful foundation such books provided for the 15-year-old future writer of "The Great Santini," "The Prince of Tides," and many other books, including the very recent "My Reading Life"!

Parade Magazine's Issue on Summer Reading

I opened today's Parade magazine (7/10/11), which comes with my Sunday San Francisco Chronicle, and which focuses this week on "Summer Reading," with both pleasure and trepidation. Anything that promotes books and reading is great, but I was wondering which books it would focus on. I was pleasantly surprised to see many excellent books featured, rather than just the same bestsellers by the same authors that are often considered prime summer reading. (Please don't think I am being condescending, as I am happy to read good "summer novels," as I have posted about before. I was just hoping there would be more of a mix, and there is.) One juxtaposition that is a bit ironic is the full-page illustration to the "2011 Summer Reading Guide" on one page, showing an idyllic green nature scene of a boy leaning against a tree reading -- wait for it -- an E-READER, while on the facing page is a lovely essay by Pat Conroy about his childhood reading at a lake, with an extended mention of the sensory, tactile feel and smells of books (REAL books, the old-fashioned kind!), their pages and covers. Surely no one will wax poetic about the feel and smell of books on an e-reader...will they? Despite being struck by this ironic contrast, I enjoyed the special issue of Parade, with its lists of "great summer books" and great audio books, and its blurbs by various famous people about which books they will be reading on their summer vacations. (Sample answer: Kathryn Stockett, author of "The Help," says that she is reading "Gone with the Wind," because "People ask me all the time what I think about that book, so I've resolved to tackle it." Other samples: actor David Hyde Pierce says that he is reading the diaries of Christopher Isherwood and really enjoying them, and Elizabeth Gilbert is reading Tina Fey's "Bossypants"...a book that is on my list too.)

"Catch-22" Revisited

Does everyone remember reading Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," probably in college? And how amazing and funny and tragic and unique it was? Who could forget Yossarian and Milo Minderbender and all the other strange, quirky, funny, touching, and very human characters? Who could forget the crazy humor and the dead seriousness of the book? There is a fascinating article in the August 2011 issue of Vanity Fair about the writing, publishing, and reception of the book. Titled "The War for Catch-22," it is adapted from Tracy Daugherty's biography of Heller. Heller worked extremely slowly, and revised multiple times over a period of eight years. He made outlines, wrote chapters out by hand, typed them, then cut them up and shuffled the pieces, over and over. He was fortunate to have caught the attention of the agent Candida Donadio and the (later very famous) editor Robert Gottlieb. The book was originally titled "Catch-18," but when Leon Uris came out with "Mila 18," Heller and Gottlieb had to find a new title. They agonized over various numbers, briefly fixing on "Catch-14," but finally settling on "Catch-22." They predicted the book would be well-received but not sell a lot. The hardcover version sold respectably, but it was the paperback version that really took off and sold in huge numbers. It became one of those zeitgeist novels, like "Catcher in the Rye," that everyone -- especially the young and hip -- had to read. And although it was about World War II, it also became a part of the discussion about the Vietnam War.