Category: Books

I’ve recently finished a couple of novels from the UK, both constructed as reminiscences. While I’ve appreciated the reflective urbanity, I found both ultimately longer than I thought they needed to be. Graham Swift’s The Light of Day was especially painful — circuitous, repetitious, hard to follow, mimicking a little too closely the labyrinth of an obsessive and wandering mind.

For the most part I really liked John Banville’s Ancient Light (great title!), the caveat being that I found the story of the aging actor, the present day version of the protagonist, less than compelling, indeed random, and tacked on. The recollection of the schoolboy romance with his best friend’s mother was the heart of the story: gripping, humorous at times, and told with verve and immediacy. Reviewers have noted that Banville seems to reach for the arcane word when, in some cases, a simpler one would do, but I enjoyed his language, and found the writing far from flowery.

Dickens’ Flora, the awkward widow from  Little Dorrit who charmingly hangs onto her hope for romance with Arthur Clennam, quotes from a verse that is so Victorian, so quaint.

 
Oft, in the stilly night
Ere Slumber’s chain has bound me
Fond memory brings the light
Of other days around me
— Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
 

I came across this beautiful poem in my beat-up copy of the The New Yorker Book of Poems, copyright 1969, by May Swenson. An excerpt:

 
Then a tall
tower began to tell “F O U R,”
and another, with different timbre, spelled it
a minute later.  Another mentioned it for the third time
in harsh bronze and slow.
Still another, with delicate chime,
countered and cantered it.  By now, the sky had turned
della Robbia-blue, the Arno yellowed silver.

I stood between the covers of my “book” and heard
a donkey’s particular heels,
like syllables of a clear, quick word,
echo over the Arno.  Then came the scrape-clink
of milk cans lowered on cobbles.  And with the moon still
there, but transparent, the sky began to fill
with downy clouds–pink
as the breasts of Botticelli’s Venus–foretinting dawn.
 

(The “book” being the shutters at her window.)

I had forgotten what a human parade, constantly being added to, is a Dickens novel. There are humorous bits that provide some relief from the constant mnemonic challenges of trying to keep the characters straight, and, in the case of The Story of the Princess that Little Dorrit tells to Maggie (in Chapter XXIV, “Fortune-Telling”) arresting bits that bring one up short with the realization that there is an odd depth to Dickens, and a poignancy that seems so compelling, so … old-fashioned.

John gave me this book for Christmas this past December, and it was a quick read over a few days at the end of the year. This evocative novel by Alfred Hayes beautifully captures a kind of noirish vision of 1950s New York City that I find absolutely irresistible. Above all locales, this is my time, my place, and, as it is for the heroine, my weather.

Autumn, she always said, was her weather. She was always happiest when the sky was clouded over and gray, and there was a fine delicate mist in the air. Summer with its heat and it unchanging sun depressed and exhausted her.
(p. 85)

Yep,that’s me.

I’m impressed by Andrew Martin’s first novel, Early Work. Judging by his author photo in the New York Times review, he can’t be much over 30, but the assuredness of his writing suggests a writer capable beyond his years.

Not a lot happens in Early Work, which makes it my favorite kind of novel. I felt a kinship with his protagonist, Peter, an aspiring writer who dropped out of an English PhD program to become a writer, but instead ends up a dependent tag-along to his girlfriend, Julia, a med school student who also happens to have accomplished more as a writer than Peter, crafting published poetry in her spare time.

Peter spends most of the book figuring out a way to break from Julia in order to be with Leslie, a woman as screwed-up as he is, and by the end he is successful, with questionable implications for his future. But it’s the journey that matters, and Martin’s writing is crafted with a keen eye for the telling detail, nuanced emotional intelligence, and a sense of balance that makes a book about screwed-up people into an artistic gem.

I frequently stopped to admire Martin’s confidence in exploring a direction that, in less capable hands, might have been a boring detour, but which this writer made part of the ultimate shape of the novel. There’s an Updike-like willingness to linger over sensory details that, while not advancing plot, yield some of the most pleasurable moments of the book. Martin is writerly in a good way; he writes very well but not ostentatiously, and his skills are always used in the service of his characters.

It’s a list that’s ever-growing. I’m starting it near the end of a year, but so be it.

NonFiction

• Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day – Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
• 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die – James Mustich

Such might have been an intriguing topic for a doctoral thesis, had I written one, and had I discovered “Wolf Solent” in earlier times. So many oddities exist in this book, and so much of it reminds me of my mother. From her I inherited my preference for the inanimate over people, as both a conduit and a touchstone for the past, for nostalgia. From her I derived my extreme distaste for the personal, the prosaic, and for the coarseness of materialism. All of these tendencies are basic to “Wolf Solent.”

Powys’ mystical view of nature has me in its grip. This book might be my new touchstone for identifying kindred souls.

 
Advancing up this lane hand in hand with his companion, Wolf felt his soul invaded by that peculiar kind of melancholy which emanates, at the end of a spring day, from all the elements of earth and water. It is a sadness unlike all others, and has perhaps some mysterious connection with the swift, sudden recognition, by myriads and myriads of growing things, of the strange fatality that pursues all earthly life, whether clothed in flesh or clothed in vegetable fibre. It is a sadness accentuated by grey skies, grey water, and grey horizons; but it does not seem to attain its most significant meaning until the pressure of the spring adds to these elemental wraiths the intense wistfulness of young new life. (p. 94, Vintage paperback edition)
 

This strange book by John Cowper Powys has already enhanced my vocabulary, even though I’m only on p. 47. So far I’ve encountered

• palimpsest
• unction
• squinnied
• vellum
• sacerdotal
• gonfalon
• captious

Powys seems to positively revel in the use of obscure language, as evidenced in the following rather extraordinary passage:

 
Mr. Urquhart smiled and leant back in his chair. He drained his wine-cup to the dregs, and with half-shut, malignant eyes, full of a strange inward unction, he squinnied at his interlocutor. The lines of his face, as he sat there contemplating his imaginary History, took to themselves the emphatic dignity of a picture by Holbein. The parchment-like skin stretched itself tightly and firmly round the bony structure of the cheeks, as though it had been vellum over a mysterious folio. A veil of almost sacerdotal cunning hovered, like a drooping gonfalon, over the man’s heavy eyelids and the loose wrinkles that gathered beneath his eyes. (p. 46)