Page 171 - At the corner of Seventh Avenue, ...I found myself approaching the stands of an all-night vegetable store, ...and spotted Sarah.

From the novel, page 171.

Chapter IX

At the corner of Seventh Avenue, above the entrance to the train station, a path I’d taken repeatedly so as to accomplish it blind-folded, I found myself approaching the stands of an all-night vegetable store, which I hadn’t noticed repeatedly, and spotted Sarah.

She was touching and handling various pieces of fruit before placing them into a basket, which she held close to her side.  She'd looked to me to be quite serene, pleased to be by herself, which she often was but wasn't often pleased by it.  She wore her day clothes, a bicolor dress of rose and gray, a continuum of her thirst for muted shades.

Photo courtesy of Mesut Ilgim
http://www.trekearth.com/members/mesutilgim/

I'd walked past the apples and the out-of-season melons and pushed through the hanging strips of plastic that kept the store's temperature moderately warm and which eliminated the need for formal portals and doors.  I'd walked up to her and stood at her side.

    "Playing the West Side homemaker?" I asked her.  I was happy to discover Sarah when she least expected me.
    "Don't step on that melon.  It's mine," she said.  "Where are you coming from?  Or will I be sorry for asking?"

(later on...as Walter and Sarah are walking home...)

We'd veered off the sidewalk. Sarah went into a small grocery store which was ready to close for the night. I'd inched my way closer to the store's front window, in order to see what Sarah was up to. A woman within came over to the window, untied a thin, nylon rope and let down a set of venetian blinds that cut off my visibility. She'd left me standing there, looking at nothing. I'd turned and stepped back onto the sidewalk and waited for Sarah. She'd emerged into the night with an open package of chocolate cookies.
   "These cookies are exactly like the kind my mother used to make," she cried, almost the epitome of cliché.
   "Are you hungry?" I asked her, resuming our journey homeward.
   "No," she replied. "I just wanted them. I love these cookies. But don't tell anybody about this; I'm not supposed to eat these anymore. I've become allergic to chocolate. Don't tell anyone I bought them." By which she meant don't tell Owen.
   "It's the memory, Walt," she cupped the package against her. "It's just the memory."

[My friend Theresa has an almost Upanishadic reverence for cookies, although cake is a wonderful thing, too...  Her love for her mother and the kinds of things her mother used to do, like cook and bake and play the piano, that brought great waves of comfort to Theresa, not only as a little girl but as a young woman as well, was/is inspiring to me.  I wanted to make Walter and Sarah secret sharers in their own right, and of course incorporate the value of memory as the glue which binds them:  And so I took something from Theresa's and my past, a simple visit to a Korean greengrocer and a stop at a small market.  Memory is oftentimes, in my household, one of the prized glories of the garden, the charm that holds friendships together, holds personalities together, even when the memory is "as heavy as a mountain."]

Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night - one of many excellent short stories by Barry Hannah.

There was a family in St. Louis I lived with, sleeping with their divorced mother.  ...The daughter, every day on the backseat of the car as she was taken to school, said, demanding: “Turn on the radio, please.”  The please just an irony in her mouth, in a flat, mean voice.  The mother obliged as if hypnotized, never pausing to find that rock-and-roll button for the brat.  One day I couldn’t bear it any longer, but when she was out of the car to school I did not attack.  Rather I started weeping because of the sadness of being around this hugely indulged vixen, and I knew love would die soon because I couldn’t stand the home life that made her possible.*

*[Excerpted from "Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night," in High Lonesome, by Barry Hannah.]

I finished the book yesterday and thought I should put it out "there" because Hannah is such a good writer, and he can make you laugh as well as push your head through a wall.  Sometimes we need that.

Here's another...

She came out into the driveway wailing as I’ve never heard a white person wail.  But you see a whole tree go over like that, and your grip on the universe goes.  A small mob of slackers came down the block and stood around the big tree over the Mercedes.  They grinned, sort of worshipping the event.  But the woods running down a hill to the east went into an exploding mutual collapse too much like the end of the world, and everyone fled back inside.

           All these old trees were like family in the act of dying; their agony was more terrible than the storm itself.  We had been confident, even arrogant, with them around us, I realized.  They’d been comforting brothers and sisters.  Now the town was suddenly half as tall.**

**["The Ice Storm," from High Lonesome, by Barry Hannah.]

John Cowper Powys Championship Page - #7 "What John and Mary really did was to make love like vicious children"

This is a sample of J.C. Powys’ natural world--it is that surrounding nonhuman electricity that becomes aware of human comings and goings.  It is just a small example of what glues me to his literature, what binds me to his mythology. 

“What John and Mary really did was to make love like vicious children; and this was due to the fact that they were both very nervous and very excitable but not in the faintest degree tempted to the usual gestures of excessive human passion.  The rationalism of analytic logic has divided erotic emotion into fixed conventional types, popular opinion offering one set of categories, fashionable psychology offering another.  As a matter of fact, each new encounter of two amorists creates a unique universe.  No existing generalisation, whether of the wise or of the unwise, covers or ever will cover a tenth part of its thrilling phenomena.  In one respect this love-making by Dye’s Hole was the most childlike that the spot had ever witnessed; in another it was the most cerebral.  The nervous excitement manifested by these two was so free from traditional sentimentality and normal passion, so dominated by a certain cold-blooded and elemental lechery, that something in the fibrous interstices of the old tree against which they leaned was aroused by it and responded to it.”

(The edition cited is A Glastonbury Romance, Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1987, pp. 70-71)

Above views of the River Wissey, mentioned in A Glastonbury Romance, and the surrounding area for the "...certain cold-blooded and elemental lechery..." of John and Mary's lovemaking.

Foulden Bridge as mentioned on p.68.

I'd like to direct your attention to the Literary Norfolk website, in which JCPowys is mentioned.  The writer of the site or the entry had this to say:

"Another superb description of the river is to be found in John Cowper Powys' novel A Glastonbury Romance (1932). The novel, which is widely regarded as Powys' best book begins in Norfolk....  The book explores Arthurian grail legends. However, in one of the early chapters John takes a trip down the river with his cousin Mary....  The writing is of extraordinary quality."

For the section on the River Wissey click here.
For the section on Northwold (Norfolk) click here. 

Orhan Pamuk says #4: ...No one looked at the clock to tell the time.

An excerpt from Orhan Pamuk's latest novel, The Museum of Innocence.
Chapter 54.

From The Museum of Innocence:

  The illusion that is time--  ...No one looked at the clock to know the time, but they did spend a lot of time talking about whether it had been wound or not, and about how a frozen pendulum might be set in motion again just by touching it once....
  "Let it be.  Let it tick.  It's not hurting anyone.  It reminds us that this house is a house."  I think I would agree.
  So the wall clock was not there to remind us of the time or to warn us that things were changing.  It was there to persuade us that nothing whatsoever had changed.

    ...Even without our being aware of it, the clock always ticked in the same way. And when we sat at the table, eating our supper, it brought us the peace of knowing we hadn't changed.  That all would stay the same with us.  That the clock served to make us forget the time, even as it continually brought us back to the present, reminding us of our relations with others.

John Cowper Powys Championship Page - Post #6 - Why I Love Margaret Drabble and An Excerpt From "Maiden Castle"

Why do I love Margaret Drabble?  Let me count the ways, but first let's start with this, from The Guardian, August 11 2006: 
"The realm of John Cowper Powys is dangerous. The reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end. There is always another book to discover, another work to reread. Like Tolkien, Powys has invented another country, densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien's, but it is as compelling, and it has more air."

MAIDEN CASTLE

A summary of the novel:
"At the centre of the novel is the aptly named Dud No-man, a historical novelist widowed after a yearlong unconsummated marriage to a woman who continues to haunt him. Inspired by pity and his own deep loneliness, Dud takes Wizzie Ravelston, an itinerant circus performer, into his home and heart.  ...As the characters in Maiden Castle struggle with the perplexities of love, desire and faith - readjusting their sights and affections - it is the looming fortress of Maiden Castle that exerts the otherworldly force that irrevocably determines the course of their lives." (text courtesy of the Powys Society official website)


 
From p. 75 of the text, Colgate University Press edition, 1994:
     He knew well how frightened he was, for his fear totally transformed, as they stood there at the bottom of those steps, the normal processes of time and space.  His fear had the effect of making each single second, each tick of the eternal watch in the pocket of the Creator, transmute itself, like a vision in a magician's mirror, into a shifting impression that was composed of space as well as of time.  The "space" of this transmuted experience, this vision over which a psychological magnifiing-glass was being projected back and forth with every breath he took, was the trodden grass and clinging mud of the fair-field; but the time-element in these magnified fear-seconds extended itself so far beyond the present as to throw a magical desirableness over both a past and a future that were free from the engrossing panic of the moment.  He was even able, while his feet were still on the steps of the caravan, as much did the nervous fear he suffered extend the content of the passsing seconds, to tell himself a story about living in unruffled peace forever, with the "eidolon" of his wife visiting him daily while both Wizzie and Thuella melted into thin air.

[Photos:  Maiden Castle is the largest Iron Age hill fort in Europe and covers an area of 47 acres, a large area, equivalent to 50 football pitches. 'Maiden' derives from the Celtic 'Mai Dun' which means 'great hill'. It is situated just 2 miles south of Dorchester in Dorset. The earthworks are immense, some ramparts rising to a height of 6 metres (20 feet) today, they have previously been even higher.  Sometimes called The 'War' Cemetery--bodies of 38 Iron Age warriors were uncovered during an excavation in the 20th century. This is evidence of a Roman attack on the fort. One of the burials had a Roman spearhead embedded in the spine.  (Text courtesy of www.photographers-resource.co.uk, photos courtesy of BBC.)]

"...with the 'eidolon' of his wife visiting..."
(an eidolon is an image, idol, double, apparition, phantom, ghost
 of a person, living or dead)
Photo courtesy of Dave McAleavy, Glasgow, Scotland. www.mcaleavy.org

"an entrance wound in their relationship." A piece cut from original Long Habit of Living manuscript.

[This piece is excerpted from the original version of the novel, before I had to condense it for the sake of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, and eventually for the sake of trimming the novel period.  Originally it occurred where Chapter XIV left off, what is now p. 285, and its time frame preceded Chapter XIX, where p. 365 is now.]

Owen was still in the doghouse, as far as Sarah was concerned, for scaring her that night she asked me to find him, the night he went to his old house in Woodside, Queens, without telling anyone.  There was a slight reparation due Sarah, not in the form of material substance but in verbal and physical reassurances, especially the kind that reinforced their emotional commitment to each other.  It wasn't a question of boundaries or equity; there was no blurting of "Let me make it up to you, honey."  There was, nevertheless, an entrance wound in their relationship.

            For three months he'd put aside what little cash he could sacrifice--since neither he nor Sarah earned more than thirty-thousand a year, and New York expenses in 1990 had climbed while salaries did not--in order to save up for the purchase of four newly published tomes on the Civil War.  Folding that money into his palm, and holding it up for excise like the third eye of a Hindu god, he offered to take Sarah to Second Avenue and spend the money on her: It was to be dinner at one of the upscale restaurants on the Upper East Side.  Sarah alleviated the sacrificial burden by letting him buy dinner, letting him pay for a taxi, and by encouraging him to pick up a quotation quiz book that he'd seen in a bookstore on Third Avenue.  She'd wanted to make a point, but she didn't want it beaten into the ground.

            He took her to the Manhattan Café.  It was large enough to protect their intimacy, and small enough to be warm and shielded from the chance of a crowd.  Over inch-and-a-half thick steaks cured in the hive glass and aged wood behind them, over cocktails and wine, Owen told Sarah jokes and read from the book of quotations.  He gave her a new one every five minutes, and the quicker he'd made them up the cornier they sounded until she pleaded with him to stop, whereupon he began casually to feel her up under the table.  He was determined that the evening should not be common.  Owen described her beet red face and sparkling blue eyes as competition with a prize rose or as substitution for an aria by Monteverdi.

            They finished eating by nine o'clock, when into the restaurant came Owen’s coworker, Douglas Tims, accompanied hand-in-hand by a woman who was not his wife.  She was somebody else's wife.  She was Andy McLean's wife, that's who she was.  The surprise that came over Owen's face, since he was the first to see them, hit Sarah like a piece of lead.  Owen saw events unfold because he preferred always to face the front of a restaurant rather than the rear, much like a mafia captain.  He'd picked up this habit from way back in his childhood, having listened to selected nefarious conversations in his father's bar.  "Keep your back to the kitchen and yourself facin' the door, son," advised an old puffy-faced regular at his father's pub.  "That way, the dame you are hitched up with don't see ya with the dame y'aren't hitched up with.  An' you can run out the back if she shows up."

            Owen immediately put his head down and examined the floral print on his plate as the maitre d' brought the newcomers past his and Sarah's table to one that was ten feet away.  Tims stopped.

            Owen looked up.

            "Douglas," he smiled.  "What a surprise."

            "Hi, Owen, Sarah," said the uncomfortable Douglas Tims.

            "Joan?  Nice to see you," continued Owen, looking to Andy's wife.

            Everyone shook hands.  Tims's face, as well as Joan's, was as white as the table cloth.  Their color, originally pinkish and rosy, brought out by the cold, had vanished.

            "How's Andy?" Sarah asked Joan of her husband.

            Although I wouldn't have asked such a question, Sarah at once felt entitled to it.  She had never considered herself a judge, but she did consider herself a good friend; and if to be a good friend to Andy McLean meant to ask his wife an embarrassing question, while she was on a date with her husband’s friend, then so be it.  Tims had already crossed his own line.

            "Oh, he's doing okay," Joan answered meekly.

            "I never get to see him," said Sarah.

            "He's been a little tired," said Joan.

            Joan's long, dark hair, partially covering one of her eyes, made a failed attempt at facial poise.  She couldn't hide who she was or what she was feeling, and demonstrated that weak link in her chain by glancing at the maitre d', who was still waiting for them to follow him.  Tims nervously tugged at his trimmed goatee and gazed flatly into Owen's face.

            "And you, Douglas?  How're you doing?" Sarah pursued with the same sense of justice, but this time there was a little playfulness in her eyes.

            "Working too hard, Sarah," he answered her.

            "Sorry to hear that."

            "So am I," said Tims, in pain.  "Well, we're going to sit."  He broke his stare, grabbed Joan's arm, and said: "Have a good night."

            They moved away to their table, and Owen called for the check.  He told me later that he and Sarah had never put their coats on in a restaurant so deftly and quickly as they did that night.

            Outside in the cold Manhattan air, Sarah hugged herself to keep warm as Owen put his arm around her and directed their walk to the nearest subway station.

            "It's nice to see our friends," remarked Sarah shivering.  "It's nice to see them sleeping with each other."

“What do you expect?"

            "They're crazy," she said.

            "They're adults, Sarah.  It's none of our business."

            "Don't say that, Owen.  Andy's your friend.  Douglas works with you.  What're you going to do?"

            "Do?  Me?  Why me?"

            "Because," she replied.  "It's always you.  What're you going to do?"

            "Nothing," he answered.

            "Doesn't it bother you that they're doing this?"

            "Sure. Because I like Douglas.  I like Joan.  But he's made me take sides, now.  I can't interfere."

            "So you're not going to say anything?" she asked.

            "Nothing," Owen repeated.  "They tried to act as if nothing was wrong.  And so did we."

            Owen had ended up saying the same thirteen words to Andy McLean in a coffee shop a few blocks and a few minutes away on that very same evening.  The initial collision had occurred less than a hundred feet from the restaurant's door.  Andy had been trailing Joan from the apartment all the way from the west Village, where Douglas Tims lived.  He intended to follow her and Tims to their final destination.  Having decided to go home after he'd found out where the two had settled, he dipped into a delicatessen for a bottle of club soda and, reemerging, bumped into Owen and Sarah.  Because of Andy's honesty, his good nature, his empathy, and his inability to keep hidden from a friend like Owen matters of great emotional strife, it didn't take Owen long to figure out what he and Sarah had got themselves mixed up in that night.

            "Have you eaten yet?" Owen asked him.

            "I'm not hungry," Andy replied.

            "That's not what I asked," said Owen.

            "How 'bout a cup of coffee?" Andy suggested.

            Owen agreed and had pulled Andy along with him and Sarah into another coffee shop around the corner.

            Sitting in a booth close to the front window, they'd soaked up coffee, tea, and chocolate cake.  Behind the counter, football highlights, political talk, the business with Iraq, and the unstoppable commercials for Christmas had blared away on a television set.

            "Sarah," Owen said.  "Change seats with me."

            "What for?" she replied.

            "I can't take it," he said.  "It's Madison Avenue talking.  It's Christmas talking."

            Both Sarah and Andy laughed uneasily as Sarah and Owen got up to change seats, so that Owen could sit with his back to the TV.

            "I can't listen," he pleaded his case smiling.  "They're trying to control my mind, you know; they're trying to control the minds of any great-grandchildren that I might end up having."

            Having changed his seat, he began to watch the condensation build up on the glass panes of the windows and thus felt protected against the outside world.  Those windows blurred the activity of a busy weeknight along Broadway.  He was safe inside, no matter what was at issue, no matter what friend's wife was sleeping with what friend.

            As he sipped his coffee, Andy asked Owen to tell Sarah what they'd talked about when they were out drinking together in Long Island City, that night prior to my going to meet Owen at the diner that weary morning.  That episode had started to take on a significance which I would recognize only too late.  Owen explained that, what Andy had alluded to on that far away evening, and what Owen had withheld from Sarah and me, was a suspicion that his wife was having an affair.  Andy couldn't prove anything and he hadn't wanted to accuse Joan of anything because their relationship had already shown signs of disintegration, and he hadn't wanted to make things worse or act unjustly.

            “It’s too expensive to keep giving up your friends,” Andy joked.

            Their marriage hadn't yet gone beyond the point of no return, but it had become difficult in the sense that, honest discussions had had worse repercussions.  They were discussions that ended up making it harder to live with each other instead of making it easier to mend the tear.  He decided to follow her, simply, remaining at a distance, without judging her.  Because, he said, he might have had something to do with the cause of her unhappiness and preferred to look at the reality of their marriage in terms of construction rather than destruction.  Suspicions had been running their course until Kathy Tims, Douglas's wife, had shown up on Andy's doorstep demanding an explanation.  (“Aha!” I had exclaimed later to Owen over the telephone.)

            Andy had no explanation to give Kathy.  She also told him to be sure to take care of his wife or she would be back.  She had her hands full dealing with Tims and his depression and his low self-esteem bullshit and she didn't want another fight.

            There wasn't much for Andy to do.  Joan McLean had talked of staying with her sister, to give herself time to think.  Apparently, she felt a lack of direction or one that was incommensurate with her wedding vows.  It was almost a cliche.  Andy had felt he was equally responsible for the mess because he kept putting off any confrontation for fear of what it might lead to.  He couldn't argue with her.  He simply deserted the emotional investment necessary for an angry and hurtful series of questions and answers.  But he hadn't wanted to give it all up.  He did, if one could phrase it this way, love her.

            "Blew my mind," admitted Andy.  "I'll give ya that much."

            "How can you be so calm, Andy?" Sarah asked.

            "I'm not calm," he replied.

            "You look it.”

            "This kinda thing happens all the time," he sighed.

            "To you?"

            "No."

            "Then, who do you know has done this?" Sarah asked him.

            "Personally?  Nobody," he answered.  "Heavy Catholics in my family."

            "Then how can you say it happens all the time?"

            "It does," insisted Andy.  "Look at what's on TV.  Look at what's in the papers under cause of death: 'fuckin' around.'  They make movies about this shit.  Look what they eat up in magazines and newspapers.  Everybody's fuckin', Sarah, and usually they're fuckin' the wrong people.  And it makes me kinda mad, y'know?  It's...  I don't know."  He shook his head and stroked his beard.  "Whole philosophies are formed from love," he smiled, treating the word with a mocking disdain.  "Or the lack of it.  I know.  I teach philosophy."

            "What're you and Joan going to do?" Owen asked him.

            "I'm gonna try and understand what the fuck happened," Andy replied.  He signaled the waitress for more water and coffee.

            "Joan’s going to split?" Sarah asked.

            "Probably."

            "Do you want to come stay with us tonight?" she asked him.  "Our place is warm.  We've got a pull-out couch.  Plenty of liquor.  Good books.  And best of all, we have Owen."

            Andy smiled and placed his hand on her arm and they both knew at once that he wouldn't take her up on her offer.

            The following morning Douglas Tims had called the office to report that he had a cold.  He called in sick the day after as well.

            "He's not returning my calls," Owen said to me.

            "Is he depressed?" I asked.

            "What do you think?” he said.

            "I would be,” I said.  “Then again, I wouldn’t put myself into this situation.”

            “No,” Owen replied.  “Not you.”

            “No.”

            “Never you,” he said.

            And the burning truth behind the sarcasm and played out joke that I have been reluctant to take chances with my heart left me with yet another scab in the center of my chest, another trace of scar tissue to cover up breathless disappointment.

            That night I hurried on home from work with an alien longing that reminded me of a little passage in War and Peace, when Pierre has just come from the Rostovs after seeing Prince Andrey, and his coachman asks him: "Now where, your excellency?"  "Where? Home!"  And the cold description of the dark night air, the starlit sky, and the longing for home filled me with anticipation.  I wasn't worried about being mugged.  I wasn’t pining to return to my family’s home in Connecticut.  I was however worried that I would encounter someone I knew.

I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it."  So begins Pat Barker's novel, Regeneration, with a letter from Siegfried Sassoon to the "Times" of London, July 1917.   A lot of parallels in Barker's novel of World War I to what's been going on in the U.S. and the world since before September 11.  We could stand to read books from and about WW I.  Might change our aggressive responses to anything and everything not American.

 Here are the fiction books I read during 2011.

The new year started with Thomas McGuane's Nobody's Angel (very funny) and James Salter's A Sport  and a Pastime.  Says Jesse Kornbluth of James Salter: "He’s considered a “writer’s writer” --- that is, too good for the masses to appreciate. There are worse things to be called. Still, to be a "writer's writer" for 35 years...."  These books are very different from each other. Both are extremes in the same world.  I liked them.  I recommend them.


In February it was more of McGuane, Driving on the Rim, and a short one from the Master, Henry James' Turn of the Screw.  I'm liking McGuane more each time I read him.

In March I read a good historical novel called Conspirata by Robert Harris, who gave us Pompeii, which I read in 2010, and liked very much.  Conspirata is the story of the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar.  You know me and gladiators, Romans, and aquaducts, just can't get enough.  Also read Colum McCann's Zoli, a very moving novel of a gypsy woman and her clan. I got lost in the time shifts, but the critics seemed to like it a lot.

Also read Jim Harrison's The English Major.  I tell you, I've read a lot of Harrison; and I wish my blog could be a brilliant and luminous billboard for the works and life of Jim Harrison.  I love his books.  His life-view is widesweeping, or widestretching or something wide, big, sprawling like Montana and Nebraska and Arizona.  He loves food and wine, and so do I.  He loves literature, and so do I.  I wish I started reading him years ago, but there's just so much a person can do.  I wish Harrison could get a postage stamp.  I wish more people would read him, especially people in power, in academia, or in hotels (instead of watching ESPN or "Two & a Half Men" and drinking expensive cocktails in the bar).

If March goes in like a lion and out like a lion, that's what it was like to read Henning Mankell's The Man From Beijing (a murder mystery of worldwide stature, brilliant, historical, well-written) and The Possibility of an Island from my man Michel Houelbecq.  Houelbecq has become my alter ego, without him knowing of course, and I've read The Elementary Particles and Platform, both of which have offended readers and critics, and I'm so glad. I've got my hands on his new book, The Map and the Territory, and can't wait to start it.

French novelist Michel Houelbecq

In June I read Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark and Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang.  Laughter in the Dark, I must admit, is not one of Nabokov's better books.  It contains his penchant for older man younger woman, very young woman, and I'm still to this day trying to figure out the "why" of the book.

  Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang is a great book.  It is a book of movement, hilarity, drunkenness, saboutage, sex, the hot hot sun of the southwest, and I tell you, while I scratched my imaginary five o'clock shadow and squinted as I took a pull on the sixth beer I wasn't drinking, I loved every minute of it.

In July I read James Jones' Some Came Running, which I got at the Santa Monica Library's bookstore for $2.00.  I've been wanting to read it for a long time, and I was not disappointed, except for the irritation factor which Jones employs by not using apostrophes when he writes contractions, and then there's this style he likes of stating a noun in a sentence, and then in the same or next sentence using that noun's adverbial form, and then adverbially again, and again.  Mr. Jones it appears was not in the habit of listening to his editors.  (Sorry, that's just me being an effete intellectual snob.)  I liked the book and hope it continues to draw readers. 

Also in July I read The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. In August I read Pat Barker's World War I novel Regeneration, the first in the trilogy, with appearances by Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen. I really enjoyed this book and am looking forward to the next two.

Also in August I finally finished Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, the first in the Cairo trilogy series.  It was a very long book, but it was also very good.  Mahfouz's expose of the male-dominant, male-hypocritical dominant culture of WW I Egypt, its occupation by the Allies, its Ottoman Empire backwardness, and its social customs that suppress women to the point of a scrap metal crusher can sometimes make for frustrating reading; but it is important to read him, I feel, it is very important. Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize, was (toward the end of his life) shot by a would-be assassin's bullet, an Islamic fanatic who didn't like the author's parodies, to say it mildly.  But he continued.  Individuals with a voice for individual freedom and the freedom of others often get in the way of the violent swing of the moralist's hammer.  The characters in Palace Walk are very likeable, and the misfortune of living in an occupied country and being hamstrung by religious fundamentalism causes one [the reader] compassion, not condescension.  Christopher Dickey of Newsweek writes:

"Palace Walk, first published in 1956, is the best of Mahfouz's work. He drew heavily on autobiography (like the character Kamal, he was the youngest son in a large merchant clan). He writes about family, and to understand the Egyptian family is to understand, more clearly than any political treatise can explain, the soul of the country."

Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz

Also read Anne Enright's The Gathering and Daniel Woodrell's Tomato Red.  Lots of anger and yelling in Enright's book, especially at a time of death; lots of anger and blame and melodramatic stuff that you need more than tea to swallow down as you read it.  Tomato Red however is a horse of a different color.  It's a very strange book, set in Ozark country, told in powerful prose with the strange leaking bizarreness of smaller than small-town life. I'll read more Woodrell for sure.  Then came Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot.  This was more interesting (for its biographical sketchs of French novelist and national hero Gustav Flaubert and his contemporaries) than it was meaningful reading (as a novel).  I haven't given up on Barnes, so don't worry.  But Flaubert's Parrot I feel was written for the academic literati, and therefore not as clever and brilliant as everyone thinks.  But that's just me being an effete intellectual snob.

Vlad Dracul, the Impaler, Count Dracula

September found me reading Muriel Spark's The Only Problem, Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, Long Last Happy by Barry Hannah, and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland.  Let's just say that I liked all three of these books.  Kostova's novel about the search for Vlad the Impaler remains fairly true to legend and revealed an immense amount of scholarship mixed with flashbacks and country-hopping.

  The Only Problem is unusual, "an extremely sophisticated account of the perils that surround our unsuspecting lives in the world today and a disputation on the subject of the Book of Job, which she calls 'the pivotal book of the Bible.'" [Anita Brookner, The New York Times]

Joseph O'Neill

 I liked Netherland more than I expected; lots of Brooklyn, shady immigrants, post-September 11 anxiety, and a troubled marriage.  I'm not doing the author justice (but I recommend it highly)  Netherland is the "story of a family. The narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a Dutch-born equities analyst who lives in a TriBeCa loft with his British-born wife, Rachel, and their son. When 9/11 forces them to flee uptown, they end up living...in the shabby-glamorous Chelsea Hotel, and it is there that their marriage slowly cracks apart.  The book’s second story line is about the solace Hans finds in the vibrant subculture of cricket in New York, where he is among the few white men to be found on the hundreds of largely West Indian teams in the city, teams that fan out, in the hazy summertime, across scrabby, lesser-known public parks." [Dwight Garner, The New York Times]

One of the most enjoyable and entertaining and empowering writers I read this year was the late Barry Hannah.  I kept quoting passages from these stories to my friends, laughing out loud while I did so; I could not get over how good this book is.  (Sorry about the tense variations within one sentence.) I can unconditionally say that, except for my friend Joe Savino, and perhaps the late Larry Brown, Barry Hannah's work was singular in its influence upon my short story writing efforts in 2011.  I haven't read a lot of Hannah's books, just a novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan and the collection of selected short stories featured at left, Long, Last, Happy, but in 2012 I'm going to. 

October was a busy month for reading, probably because like August and September, the six furlough days I had to take from work gave me down time and escape time.  Only negative there is escaping into literature isn't going to pay the bills.  Nevertheless, here's to October:  The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley; The Great Leader by Jim Harrison; On Beauty by Zadie Smith; and A Man of Parts by David Lodge.

Author photos:  James Crumley, David Lodge, H.G. Wells

The Last Good Kiss is not the kind of book I would have picked up in years gone by, unless it came highly recommended by someone I know.  But I tell you, this book is hilarious.  You've got the pervading presence of an alcoholic bulldog among a cast of whacked out other characters while our protagonist is trying to solve a mystery and trying to do so while intensely inebriated.  I loved this book.  A Man of Parts, another book by one of my favorite authors, David Lodge, this time about H.G. Wells.  Lodge also gave us Author Author about the Master, Henry James, so you can bet your bottom dollar he's aces in my book, and has been for many many years.  I have posted on the wall above my big chair, in which I read, some codes of narrative coherence that Lodge feels one should, as a writer, adhere to.   A Man of Parts gives one insight into H.G. Wells that quite frankly astounded me. And I'm not going to share them here either, you have to read the book.  Zadie Smith's On Beauty is a very good book; well-written, intelligent; her prose places the cheek of another human face close to your own skin to prove that we are not all that different.  Feel the warmth.
The Great Leader by my hero Jim Harrison is subtitled a faux mystery.  But it wasn't so; he followed the structure of a good mystery and entertained us (as he usually does) with his love of food and poetry and drink, and his love of the exquisite bottoms of young women; so many sexual meanderings to the point of well, damn, the book had to come to an end someplace.  Unfortunately.

November gave me Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna; Pete Dexter's Paris Trout; Sam Lipsyte's The Ask; and Jim Harrison's Warlock.  This was some month, aside from Thanksgiving.

 My friend Barbara Mock Autry and I, one fine spring evening in San Diego, shortly before she and her family moved East, were talking books and I brought up Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, which she read and loved; "...then you have to read The Lacuna.  You will love it, Mark," she said, "I know you will." And I did.

Artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

The sections with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were very entertaining, I enjoyed quoting them to my friends.  The historical points of reference concerning the Mexican communist party movement, the sanctuary given to Leon Trotsky by the Riveras, even though Trotsky's on Stalin's hit list, and the hypocrisy of American govenment and culture during the HUAC period, together with a young man's blossoming writing career based on his life with Frida and her bunch, all made for a wonderful book. And I haven't even explained the half of it.

Barbara Kingsolver

 I am a great fan of Barbara Kingsolver, to be sure.

 Paris Trout.  What can I say about the meanest sonofabitch I've come across in a long time, not since Larry Brown's character of the father in Joe.  Paris Trout is a true believer; he's also a despicable human being. This is a great book.  At times it was a nightmare.

  "Things look different ways when they ain't clear," Trout said.  "I don't forgive debts," he said.  "I pay my obligations, and I am paid in return.  ...you forgive one debt, ain't none of them going to pay you ever." 

The nastiness of Paris Trout sent me through the roof, especially when he declares, "I don't have a cruel heart."  Well, my friends, read the book.

I also read The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, which had some moments, I must admit.  And then Warlock by Jim Harrison, about an unemployed foundation executive whose life becomes unhinged.  I enjoyed this book very much.  It's Jim Harrison.

 In December it was McEwan's Black Dogs. This is a strange book, and McEwan often makes me uncomfortable, which is the pleasure I get from reading him. "The story revolves around a dramatic and terrifying event which changed the whole life of the narrator's mother-in-law, affecting her rather as Paul's vision on the Road to Damascus did him, although the experience was one of darkness, not of light. ...Black Dogs is curious and at times unpleasant. In the end, you can, as Bernard would, dismiss it as just a story, or, like June, you can look deeper and ponder the ideas further." [Courtesy of Ann Skea]
Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat was crazy; a crazy Englishwoman in Rome. So far it's by my least favorite book from her.  Cross Channel by Julian Barnes is a collection of short stories about English people who have settled in northern France, and I'm talking Middle Ages, post-World War II, any time.  It's a pretty good collection. I'm looking forward to reading more of Barnes.

And that, as they say, is that.