If you’re tired of the current glut of wimpy, sparkly-shiny vampires, this book is the perfect antidote. Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan have given us vampires that are brutal, disgusting, ravenous monsters — and they are out to take over Manhattan. [Read more →]
From time to time I will write about the short novel or novella. Over the last 100 years, American authors have written some of the finest novellas in any language. For authors like William Styron and Carson McCullers, their novellas, The Long March and The Ballad of the Sad Café respectively, are the best things they wrote. [Read more →]
For her seventh installment of the Bastion Club series, Stephanie Laurens, in The Edge of Desire, tells the story of Christian Allardyce, the Marquess of Dearne, and his long-lost love Lady Letitia Randall. Like the previous six novels in the series, the hero, Christian, has been away for the past ten years, a spy for England in France during the Napoleonic Wars. He returns, expecting that his love, Letitia, has waited for him, only to discover she married years before. [Read more →]
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the movie, as most people know, is based upon a short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not one of his best, Fitzgerald’s story is relatively brief, a rather obvious playing-out of what he must have considered a clever idea — a life lived backwards. It’s written in the same fabulist mode in which he wrote several other stories. Two of them, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “Oh, Russet Witch,” are two of my favorite short stories of all time. [Read more →]
When Falls the Coliseum wants to expand its book coverage. If you are a book reviewer, or would like to be one, we’d be happy to hear from you. Our plan is to have a weekly column or columns that cover recent books in a variety of genres. This could include mystery, crime fiction, chick-lit, science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels/comics, so-called literary fiction, romance, and all subjects of nonfiction.
If you are interested, visit our submissions page and send us a bio like the kind our contributors have written. Also indicate that you would like to review books and tell us how frequently you can do this (every week, every other week, once a month) and what genre(s) you would like to cover. [Read more →]
Of the friends I’ve asked about this, those who have read any of Updike’s four Rabbit books have either read them all, including the novella in the story collection Licks of Love, or they stopped, as I did, with the second book Rabbit Redux. The last two novels of the tetralogy either seemed just too much more Rabbit to take, or too long, more than 1,000 pages combined, to consider making the investment. I fell into the latter category until Updike passed away last January. I’ve since read Rabbit is Rich, and will eagerly move on to Rabbit at Rest soon. [Read more →]
I’m home sick today with the flu. Watching Woody Allen’s funny, but dated Bananas, I notice a laughing Eudora Welty’s brief cameo. She gets a big kick out of Woody sticking his cap in her face. Ah, Eudora. You saved my life. [Read more →]
I began my writing life several decades ago as a book reviewer, but I’ve largely kicked the habit. It isn’t that reviewing isn’t important or interesting; it is a vital democratic conversation about books, journalism, ideas, and imagination. As a young aspiring writer I fell into it easily, maybe too easily. But after reviewing a few score volumes as I have tried to do — carefully, generously, critically — one tends to get a bit of genre fatigue. One tires of praising and of scolding. And having written a couple of books myself, and seen them (fairly and unfairly) praised and scolded, the urge to judge others diminishes even further. [Read more →]
William Faulkner is not an author whose books one tends to reread. When you’ve mounted the Everests of Absalom, Absalom! or The Hamlet, for example, you may feel exhilarated and triumphant, but you don’t particularly yearn to start all over from the beginning. I’ve read Light in August twice and will again. Of all Faulkner’s novels, it is the most atmospheric in its depiction of the hot summer deep South and the most tragic and compelling in the trajectory it plots for its main characters.
Race is never far from the surface in Faulkner’s books and it is front and center here. Joe Christmas, who has often passed for white when he meets the sexually frustrated and menopausal Joanna Burden, is possibly the richest black character in all of Faulkner. The innocent but pregnant Lena Grove is Eve in a fallen world, and the Reverend Hightower, as Christmas’s conflicted protector and Lena’s deliverer, unites the novel’s various themes of racial intolerance, isolation born of conscience, and the search for or avoidance of one’s true identity. Christian themes and parallels abound, but the book is never schematic or preachy. And the ending is one of the most memorable in all of 20th century fiction.
Light in August is also one of the most readable of Faulkner’s novels. Certainly the clotted and hyper-descriptive, and repetitive, prose of Absalom, Absalom!, or the dense and challenging stream-of-consciousness in The Sound and the Fury (I confess to having read only the first section, though I’ve tried the second at least twice and gave up both times!) have their considerable rewards, however much patient rereading is required, but “Light in August” is written in a lovely distillation of Faulknerian prose. I’ll leave you with this passage, one of my favorites, describing the pregnant Lena watching the slow progress of a wagon coming her way. It’s about the most overwrought you’ll find in the book:
The sharp and brittle crack and clatter of its weathered and ungreased wood and metal is slow and terrific: a series of dry sluggish reports carrying for a half mile across the hot still pinewinery silence of the August afternoon. Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road. So much is this so that in the watching of it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread rewound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost traveling a half mile ahead of its own shape. ‘That far within my hearing before my seeing,’ Lena thinks.
Other highly recommended works of Faulkner: As I Lay Dying, “A Rose for Emily” (short story), The Bear, and Go Down, Moses.
Now Read This! appears every Monday. Learn about all the great books you wish you’d read. Then read them.
Tomorrow at noon my first When Falls The Coliseum column on books will be published under the title “Now Read This!” Thanks to Scott Stein for suggesting the concept and offering it to me. The premise is simple. I’ll write brief essays on books I’ve read that perhaps you’ve always considered reading yourself, but have put off until now.
As an unreconstructed 70’s English major (who fondly remembers the New Criticism), I’ve continued to read throughout my adult working life, even though that work, mostly in the symphony orchestra business, had nothing to do with books. I’ve tended to follow my “enthusiasms.” I’ll discover an author, like Balzac or Alice Munro, and proceed to read as many of his/her works as I can until the “enthusiasm” runs its course. So, not only will I write on a specific book, but I’ll often conclude with a short list of additional recommendations for the same author. And, I intend always to include one or two extended quotes from the work at hand, to give you a sense of the author’s style.
For the most part, I’ll focus on novels, unconfined to either country or century, but I will also recommend the occasional short story or story collection, or poem or book of poetry.
Finally, I invite comment. “Now Read This!” will have its own point of view, strongly held (I assure you), but I will love nothing more than to be challenged, even contradicted in my assessment of a book’s value. And, though I promise to be as accurate as I can be, I will not be thoroughly rereading books in order to write about them — so please correct a mistake when I make one. Until tomorrow!
In July I posted “Making Time,” talking about how important it is for a writer to make time to write. My daughter was born a week later, and I didn’t write a new word for the next six months. At random points during that period, when my synapses were actually firing in a semi-functional capacity, I would occasionally think to myself what a sanctimonious ass I must have sounded like, lecturing people about whether or not they were writing.
Am I a sanctimonious ass? Maybe. Please allow me some retrospective. [Read more →]
David Orr’s recent New York Times Book Review essay on greatness in poetry is a bland bit of punting. I’ve read it twice and I still don’t understand what he’s trying to say. The main thesis, that defining greatness in poetry is very difficult to do, is obvious enough, but he never makes the attempt himself.
Taking John Ashbery as his last great poet — apparently just because the Library of America has chosen to release his collected works — sets the essay off on the wrong course from the beginning. Richard Wilbur, anyone?
He also seems to believe that quantity of work should be a necessary element in defining greatness. Though, it seems to me, Shakespeare would be great if he’d written only the sonnets; Eliot if he’d written only the Four Quartets and/or the Waste Land; Stevens if only Sunday Morning, Peter Quince at the Clavier, Anecdote of the Jar and a handful of other poems; Keats if only the odes; Rilke if only the Duino Elegies.
Greatness in poetry has become difficult to define because we live in a time when the very notion of Quality itself is being challenged, which is a point Orr fails to stress. How, if we don’t exert judgment and taste, can we ever hope to make distinctions such as good versus great, or even good versus bad?
Of course, it isn’t what is said, but how it is said, that’s most important in poetry. For example, this, one of Richard Wilbur’s greatest poems:
Praise in Summer
Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savour’s in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?
I’ve never found anything in Ashbery to match it, to even come close. So, others might say, that’s your opinion. To which I answer, show me a poem of the last 50 years any better. Having that discussion just might be the only way to define greatness in our time.
I’ve had this habit for years. Now and then I search the book section of Amazon.com for the upcoming books of a certain list of authors. It’s how I know that Kazuo Ishiguro has a book coming out on September 22, Thomas Pynchon on August 4, and Nicholson Baker on September 8. (For a while Amazon was listing a new Philip Roth book for the fall, but that’s disappeared.) As I say, I’ve been doing this for years, ever since Amazon started up more than ten years ago. The list of authors is made up of novelists or fiction writers of high literary quality (I make no apologies whatsoever for that qualification), who have written at least a few excellent novels or short story collections, who, for the most part, can be relied on to turn out another great book every few years. Here’s the list, 46 in all, in no special order:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Kazuo Ishiguro
Thomas Pynchon
Lorrie Moore
Martin Amis
Annie Dillard
Ian McEwan
T.C. Boyle
Milan Kundera
George Saunders
Nicholson Baker
Jeffrey Eugenides
Nathan Englander
Shirley Hazzard
Salman Rushdie
Jane Smiley [Read more →]
Congratulations to contributor Frank Wilson, whose blog Books, Inq was named one of the “100 Best Blogs” by the Sunday Times. Of course, we knew Frank when he was only famous to the many fans of his blog and to book lovers who appreciated his great work as book review editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer. We’re cutting edge like that. Don’t forget to read Frank’s column That’s What He Said every Tuesday morning at When Falls the Coliseum. Eight-thirty sharp.
Paula: I want to discuss the quality of student writing. Since both of us have taught for a long time, it seems to me something we can address. I have to say that I’m confused when I hear people as diverse as merchants in the stores I frequent and women at the gym I go to gripe about how badly kids write nowadays. I happen to think that they write better, in certain respects at least, than they ever have before. Yes, they don’t always understand comma usage, but they do seem capable of writing, when they want to, with fluency and verve. You’ve taught your share of writing courses, Robert — what do you think?
Robert: The gripes you mention are definitely a pet peeve of mine. I think society is ignorant about the nature of writing and what it means to write well. There is a widespread belief that good writing is all about knowing where to place a comma, knowing the various parts of a sentence. This misconception comes on top of a recurrent and strange tendency each generation has of insisting that the writing of the successive generation has deteriorated.
I remember talking with my optometrist a while back (he’s just one of many examples), and he asked me what I did for a living. I said I teach freshman writing in college, at Drexel. “Oh, that must be a really difficult job.” I may have laughed nervously or something, but I wanted to say, “Not for the reasons you think, buddy.” The reason my job is hard is because grading papers (I teach four courses a term) is exhausting. It’s not hard because student writing “is bad.” [Read more →]
I went to a mixer last night that was, according to the invitation, to be on the topic of “publishing,” and brought along a friend, a publicist for a boutique publishing house in the Chicago suburbs, who was looking to do some networking and meet some of her peers.
As it turned out however, two of the three advertised speakers (the third didn’t show up) were members of what I like to call the Screen-Based Community, which is to say professional bloggers, and the discussion was entirely about online publishing, micro-blogs, corporate blogs, and the like.
Attempting to be a devil’s advocate and a mild-to-moderate pain in the ass, I tried during the discussion session that followed the presentations to question the largely unquestioned assumption by at least one of the presenters that, as he put it, “print is dying a slow and painful death.”
It is inarguable that many print publications are exhibiting these days all of the signs of “cachexia” (wasting away), and it is equally inarguable that, if present trends continue, we may sooner or later be left with only a handful of print newspapers — the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and so on — and few if any of the traditional city newspapers. Here in Chicago, in fact, there appears to be a spirited race between the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune to see whose pulp incarnation will disappear first.
Magazines, most of them anyway, would appear to be in trouble too, as their lifeline, advertising, slowly bleeds away to the Web.
But, as I pointed out during the discussion, “present trends almost never continue.” The reason is that technology trends, and trends in general, rarely if ever move in a straight and predictable line, and are instead subject to reconsiderations, reversals, and revivals of older and seemingly abandoned methodologies. [Read more →]
I feel badly about John Updike’s passing, for several reasons. First, I regret that my one and only review of an Updike novel (at PopMatters.com) was mostly negative. The Widows of Eastwick was not his best novel, by a long shot, but I wrote about it looking back at many great books and looking forward to reviewing a better. And I regret, deeply, the passing of another great literary lion — with Bellow, Mailer, and Updike gone, that leaves only Philip Roth from the pinnacle of that great literary era I was lucky enough to live through. (Live long, Philip!) But most of all I regret that the great, protean outpouring from Updike’s pen is now stoppered. There’s probably a novel or two more finished, and another collection of non-fiction, to come, but the end is here. And that is just plain depressing news.
I met Updike at a cocktail party before a reading and he signed my copy of Brazil. (My review refers to a discussion we had related to that book.) I remember asking him about Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I was upset by Franzen’s making humor of Alzheimer’s in the book, which had struck close to home for personal reasons, and I wanted to know from Updike if he’d read it and was similarly offended. He said he hadn’t, which, considering all the hooha about it at the time, was surprising. He said, though, “Well, now I’ll have to read it.” I’ll never know if he did or not, since he’s never written about the book to my knowledge.
My favorite Updike includes the first two Rabbit books, all of the Bech stories, “S”, Brazil, Gertrude and Claudius, Marry Me, The Witches of Eastwick, The Centaur, and the many many short stories I’ve read over the years. Books like Memories of the Ford Administration, In the Beauty of the Lilies, and Villages, left me cold, but I couldn’t deny the sustained beauty of the writing even while I found the story or the structure of the books disappointing. Some have complained of Updike (and Joyce Carol Oates) that perhaps if he had written less, he might have written more great books. That, to me, is like saying if Babe Ruth had been fewer times at bat he might have hit more home runs. The home runs Updike did hit will go on forever.
A mysterious new follower of ENC Press just posted this link on Twitter: a collection of 21 reviews of Updike works from London Review of Books.
It’s an unfortunate fact of life — or, rather, of death — that it takes the passing of a great artist for many people to first become acquainted with his work. So be it. If you haven’t yet read any John Updike, or know of him primarily from his somewhat, though not entirely, unfair reputation as a horny chronicler of suburban marital disfunction, you owe it to yourself to discover what an effortlessly insightful, memorable, and clever (in the best sense of that word) writer he was.
Fortunately, it isn’t difficult at all to make his acquaintance, because he was at his best when his writing was most compressed. The Rabbit novels had their moments, but for pure spine-tingling genius, there is no substitute for his short stories.
I discovered just how amazing his short stories are when I was a freshman in college. I was majoring in psychology at the time, for reasons I no longer can recall, when I happened to read one of his stories in a beat-up paperback collection. I also can’t remember the story’s title, but there was a paragraph in there — something to do with a brief encounter between a man and a woman in an apartment doorway — that contained more insight into human behavior than all of my psychology classes put together.
Within days, I’d switched my major to English.
Since then, I’ve read almost everything he’s written, except for some of his lesser novels (and there were a few too many of those, unfortunately.) Second only to his short stories is his incredibly generous literary criticism, which cast its glow over some of the greatest writers of our time, including some that you and I would otherwise never have heard of.
It’s sad, in a way, that there is nobody like Updike around today to write a proper appreciation of Updike himself. But at least we still can savor Updike’s appreciations of his fellow writers — even if, in most cases, his genius far outshone theirs.
John Updike, who died today at the age of 76, was never one of my favorite authors. He was a little too, I don’t know — suburban? — for my taste. Like if Rob Petri worked at The New Yorker, lived in New Rochelle, and instead of tripping over the ottoman on his way in the door, stumbled into bed with a neighbor’s wife, while his wife got it on with Robbie’s swimming coach and in the end everyone felt guilty and unsatisfied.
There was much more to John Updike, but I missed most of it until close to the end. I met Updike once at a writer’s conference at Montgomery County Community College. While driving there on Rt. 73 (Limekiln Pike) through Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, I passed a small street named Rabbit Run, which I dutifully reported to Mr. Updike when I had the opportunity. “NO!” he said, delighted. He was cordial, approachable and astoundingly devoted to his home state. He was a Pennsylvania gentleman.
For some reason I always thought of Updike as a New England writer when in fact he had a keystone heart as natural and durable as a mortarless stone wall. In the couple of hours I spent in his company he referenced his Berks County roots and his Middle Atlantic values repeatedly in a formal address and casual conversation. He was in awe of the majesty of Philadelphia and the vitality of Pittsburgh. He felt a bit like a country boy on the edge of Pennsylvania big city life. And even into his mid-70’s his boyish innocence in person remained as affecting as his urbane and world weary sexuality in his writing. I feel honored to have shaken his hand in friendship.
