"Old Girlfriends," by David Updike

Until a recent trip to the Mill Valley Friends of the Library book sale (which I have mentioned several times on this blog as a favorite source of books), I hadn’t realized, or at least hadn’t remembered, that the late great John Updike’s son David Updike is also a published writer of fiction. (Such instances always make me wonder, as I imagine they do you, what it must be like to be the child of a famous author who also wants to write. Of course there must be advantages regarding role modeling, influence, and access, but what a burden to be constantly and very publicly compared with one's parent.) At the sale, I picked up Updike Junior's short story collection, “Old Girlfriends” (St. Martin’s, 2009). It turns out he has published several books, including a quartet of books for “young readers.” He also illustrated a children’s book written by his father. Although it may not be fair to read the son’s work in the light of the father’s, I of course couldn’t resist doing so. However, as I read, that focus faded. There are definitely influences from the senior Updike’s writing, not only in style but also in settings and subject matter (families, relationships, infidelity, suburbia). Surprisingly, though, I also detected -- in some of the stories -- the stylistic influence of Hemingway. But because the main focus is on human relationships, and because the stories are well written, I enjoyed this collection. Would I go out of my way to find more of David Updike’s work? Probably not. But if I ran across another of his books, I would pick it up and leaf through it, and possibly buy or borrow it.

Read Them When Young, Read Them When Older?

Yesterday I wrote about rediscovering and resubscribing to The New York Review of Books. One passage in the 5/24/12 issue particularly caught my eye, as it so well expressed a feeling about books that I have also sometimes felt. In Giles Harvey’s review of Geoffrey Dyer’s new book, “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews,” he quotes Dyer as writing that “at twenty I imagined I would spend my middle age reading books that I didn’t have the patience to read when I was young. But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty. At that age I plowed through everything in the Arnoldian belief that each volume somehow nudged me imperceptibly closer to the sweetness and light. I read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Ulysses, Moby Dick. I got through The Idiot even though I hated practically every page of it. I didn’t read The Brothers Karamazov: I’ll leave it till I’m older, I thought – and now that I am older I wish I’d read it when I was younger, when I was still capable of doing so.” Although I do not share his feelings about some of the specific examples Dyer lists, I do relate to his point. When I was in high school, college, graduate school, and for a while after, I also “plowed through” many books I didn’t actually enjoy all that much, but wanted to know the books, to engage with them, to have read them, to have them as part of my experience. Now these many years later, I am more likely, as I have written about here before, to let myself off the hook if I am not enjoying a book, or even if I think in advance that I will not enjoy one. This may not be ideal, but I accept it about myself. I must say I appreciate Dyer’s expressing his feelings about this (although it is quite possible he is exaggerating a bit for effect).

Rediscovering The New York Review of Books

Many years ago, I subscribed to The New York Review of Books. I enjoyed it, and learned from it, but the review essays were so long and dense that I would sometimes put off reading them, and the copies would pile up to a point that they felt oppressive and made me feel guilty. And I was reading so many other periodicals. So I somewhat reluctantly but realistically stopped subscribing, and have picked the periodical up only occasionally since then. Until… A couple of weeks ago in an independent bookstore, I saw the NYR for sale; something drew me to it and on a whim, I picked up a copy. A couple of days later, I started reading it and found almost every review/essay absorbing and well written. Some standouts were a poignant essay by Jerome Groopman about a boy who died partly because of his doctors’ mistakes; E. L. Doctorow’s beautiful essay about Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” which rekindled the feelings I had when I read this novel in college; W. S. Merwin’s “Poem for Adrienne Rich,” which brought tears to my eyes as I continue to mourn this great poet and feminist; an Anthony Grafton review of Andrew Delbanco’s “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be”; Joyce Carol Oates on Jeanette Winterson’s new memoir; Darryl Pinckney on post-blackness; Nadine Gordimer on current South Africa; and Garry Wills on the implacable hatred between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy (as portrayed in Robert Caro’s fourth volume of his Johnson biography). And these were only the highlights. What a rich array of topics, well-known writers, and important books reviewed. I was reminded of how the NYR consistently commissions some of the best writers alive to write essays that are far more than simply book reviews; thus readers learn so much from the review essays, and have the added pleasure of the high-quality writing. I was bedazzled all over again! Then, serendipitously, a day later I saw in The Nation magazine an ad for a very reduced cost trial subscription to the NYR. This confluence of events seemed to be a sign; it seemed it was meant to be that I subscribe again, after all these years. And so I did.

"Letters to a Friend," by Diana Athill

What a delight to have a new book from the wonderful Diana Athill! I have written about this author before (3/15/10): She is in her 90s and after a long career as an esteemed editor for the publisher Andre Deutsch, became famous late in life for her series of memoirs, including “Yesterday Morning,” “Stet,” and “Somewhere Towards the End,” all of which I thoroughly enjoyed. The new book is “Letters to a Friend” (Norton, 2011). Since 1980, Athill had been corresponding with the American poet Edward Field. He kept all her letters, and felt that others would enjoy them and they should be published. I am glad he proposed this, and she agreed, as her letters from almost thirty years confirm the impressions I already had from the memoirs; they are direct, immediate, frank, kind, detailed, funny, and genuine. She is clearly a good and loyal friend, not only to Field (with whom she is still corresponding) and his partner Neil Derrick, but to her other friends. She is modest and self-deprecating, but not too much so. She frankly admits that she is enjoying the attention and fame that have come to her late in life, but she is also well aware of -- and writes wryly about -- the ebbs and flows of such fame. She speaks of both the pains and joys of being an older person. By the end of the collection, a reader feels she knows Athill’s world, her writing, her friends, her routines. One interesting thread throughout is the fact that Athill writes the letters (and her memoirs) with pen and paper, then a typewriter, and finally, reluctantly, a word processor/computer; she writes entertainingly about the process of moving through and adjusting to these various writing implements. Sometimes published collections of letters can be somewhat mixed and even downright tedious, but this one is always engaging, never dull. Highly recommended.

"Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake," by Anna Quindlen

As a member of the Baby Boomer generation, I enjoy reading memoirs and other books written by my contemporaries; I feel a real connection to people who have experienced the same slice of time, of history, at the same age. There have been several books by Baby Boomers about what it is like to get into the territory formerly labeled “old.” Of course my generation, with its sense of itself as exceptional, has relabeled these years. “Sixty is the new forty.” “Old age now means at least 70 or 75.” These are the stories we tell ourselves. We are too healthy, too active, too involved, to be old. (Except for when we are not; we have all experienced, or had friends our age who have experienced, serious health problems.) One such book is the one I have just read, Anna Quindlen’s “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir” (Random House, 2012). Quindlen, a novelist/journalist/columnist/self-help author, shares memories of her own life and work, along with reflections on aging and intimations of mortality both as she has experienced them and in a wider context. One section I particularly liked was her thoughts on the big changes in women’s lives over the past 40 years or so, and the related issues that still exist. The book is thoughtful and serious, yet with a light touch. It is easy to read and to connect to, especially for fellow Baby Boomer women, but I think younger and older readers would enjoy the book as well.

"Crusoe's Daughter," by Jane Gardam

There is a special pleasure in opening a novel and immediately feeling one is in the hands of a master. (Side note: I really wish there were an equivalent, non-gendered term for women, one that did not have the other connotations that the word “mistress” does. Or better still, a gender-neutral term. “Master” is ostensibly gender-neutral nowadays, but it doesn't really feel that way.) There is that leap of recognition and joy at knowing that one can absolutely trust that the pages ahead will be beautifully written and will take the reader on a journey that will be original, that will connect with one’s own experience yet make one see the world in a new way. This is what I have learned to feel when beginning a novel by Jane Gardam. On 3/18/10 I wrote about how terrific her paired novels, “Old Filth” and “The Man in the Wooden Hat” were. I have read some of her other work as well, including her short story collection “The People on Privilege Hill.” I have just finished her “Crusoe’s Daughter,” which was originally published in the U.S. in 1985, has now been reissued (Europa, 2012), and is being reviewed very positively this year. Oh, what a novel! It is the story of Polly Flint, from age six to her current age of 85, and her life in a yellow house on the marshes in rural northern England. An orphan, she is raised by two aunts and a few other adults (a friend who lives with the aunts, a housekeeper, an uncle who comes to visit regularly); she rarely travels away from her beloved house and marshes; she has brushes with love and sex, but never marries. She never goes to school (she is what we would now call home-schooled) but her real education comes through the books in her late grandfather’s library. In particular, throughout her life, her great guiding light is the novel “Robinson Crusoe.” She reads and re-reads it dozens of times, eventually translates it into German and French, and writes about it. More important, she uses it as a source of inspiration, information, strength, and moral guidance. I worry that this plot description in no way does justice to the power and beauty of the story. “Crusoe’s Daughter” is crisply, precisely written, yet sings. It is so engaging that I spent most of a day reading it, a day when I should have been doing other things, but just had to keep reading, not in a page-turner bestseller way, but in the way one feels when one has entered a unique, compelling universe and can’t bear not to stay in it to the end. I haven’t given this designation to a book for a while, but enthusiastically give it to “Crusoe’s Daughter”: Highly recommended!

"Hemingway & Gellhorn": The Film

On Monday evening (5/28/12) I watched “Hemingway & Gellhorn” on HBO. This new film focuses on the two writers' work and relationship during and after the years of the Spanish Civil War. Martha Gellhorn was a great writer and brave war correspondent/reporter in her own right, and the two writers are portrayed in the thick of both the Spanish Civil War and other situations such as a trip to China and secret meetings with Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Madame Chiang, and with Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai). The thrill and danger of wartime and world affairs were part of what attracted the two to each other. There is apparently, for example, nothing like a romantic interlude in a hotel that is being bombed at the time. Although Hemingway admired Gellhorn immensely, was unfaithful to his second wife with her, and then made Gellhorn his third wife, he also sometimes felt competitive with her, and resented her going off to report on wars and other stories around the world. The movie stars Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, both of whom are great actors and did well in this film, but somehow Owen -- whose acting I usually admire admire and enjoy -- didn’t quite capture Hemingway for me. To be fair, this may be because Owen played Hemingway in a more subdued manner than he is usually portrayed, and perhaps this more nuanced portrayal is actually more accurate than the exaggerated one we are used to. Kidman as Gellhorn was brilliant. This movie was directed by Philip Kaufman, who lives and works here in San Francisco. In fact, the whole movie was filmed in the San Francisco Bay Area, with some very creative use of various Bay Area sites to stand in for Spain, Cuba, and China, among other places.