May

22

A New Find

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I didn’t intend to be reading two books by one author at the same time, especially not an author I’ve never read before.  Normally I would think of this as a risky proposition.  I can’t actually remember if I requested the two books from the library at the same time or not.  I think the only reason it happened is because I really needed audiobooks for my car trips and one of this author’s books was immediately available on cd.

The author in question is Colson Whitehead, someone I’ve heard of before.  I remember when his last novel came out but it didn’t quite sound like something I wanted to read.  His new book, Sag Harbor, sounded more up my alley (though the dreaded teenage-summer books can be quite dreadful) and I’d heard he was good so I figured I’d give it a shot.  What really surprised me is that this brand new and well-reviewed book had no requests so I got it right away.  Which meant I went home not only with it, but also with the audiobook of his first novel, The Intuitionist.

The two books are definitely very different.  The Intuitionist exists in Whitehead’s created world, existing probably somewhere like the 50’s, in a city resembling New York.  In the world he crafts, elevators are more than just something you use to travel between floors, they play a grander role in the psyche of society.  Being an elevator inspector, like our heroine, is something to aspire to.  In many ways the book follows established noir patterns.  There is a mystery to be solved, which leads to another mystery, no one is really what they seem.  But I think it’s that new world Whitehead creates that is most interesting.  The protagonist, Lila Mae Watson, is like many of the male PI anti-heroes of noir, proud and cold but still vulnerable to being played by others.  Most interesting, I think, was her tendency to immediately do whatever someone else expected of her, especially when they thought she was someone or something else.  It’s also a book about race, since Lila Mae is one of only a very small number of black inspectors, and the world is certainly one where no civil rights era has yet come to pass.  I liked the loftiness of the novel, though I don’t know that audiobook is the best format for it.  I would occasionally get lost when he cut between scenes or times, but it was still lovely to listen to.

Whitehead pretty much cemented his status as one of my favorite current authors when I read Sag Harbor.  Happily it does not go down the dreaded teenage summer of change path.  Instead it just sets you down inside Benji’s world, lets you know the time (the mid 80’s), the place (Sag Harbor is the black version of the Hampton’s) and his own age (just coming through the middle years of high school, still wearing braces).  You go through Benji’s summer without anything of great magnitude happening.  It isn’t about the summer that changed my life.  It’s just a snapshot of a time and place and person.  It’s a lot of fun to read, not just because of the flashing back to teenage antics–this perhaps more than any book I can remember reading lately reminded me of the indignity of teenage-dom–but because Whitehead has a playful first-person narrative that makes it fun.  I started the book on a plane and was mostly just diving through it.  Fortunately, halfway through I relaxed a little and started paying attention to the narrator’s little asides and descriptions.  In many books these things are tedious, in Sag Harbor every one is of great consequence–perfectly capturing whatever he’s describing and making you laugh, too.  It does kind of feel like the way someone would talk to you while you sat out in beach chairs reminiscing, the way we’d all like to talk if we could.

Like The Intuitionist, Sag Harbor also is a lot about race.  Benji’s family is upper-class, they have a beach house, he wears preppy clothes and likes D&D.  He doesn’t yet realize the disconnect between himself and much of his race, but his older, narrating self does and that dichotomy plays out well.  Benji is not the kid who grows up listening to rappers with street cred (although old school hip hop is just starting to come into being and certainly plays a role) and his naivete is definitely part of his charm and the book’s.

I have already reserved one of Whitehead’s two other novels, John Henry Days, at the library.  I like new discoveries.

May

18

Success, Volume 2

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With a giant three-volume biography to conquer, and a nice long three-trimesters of pregnancy to deal with, in my head I basically get three months per volume of Graham Greene’s life.  It doesn’t actually work that way, since the first volume took so long that I didn’t finish it until I was well into my second trimester.  But now, less than two months after finishing Volume 1, I have finished Volume 2!  That gives me a good 8 weeks or so for Volume 3, and I’m confident I can do it.  (Though I’m not confident the library’s copy actually exists, which may be a problem.)

Volume 1 was a bore, I have to admit it.  But you can’t really skip it or else nothing in Volume 2 has any context.  And Volume 2 is so exciting!  World War II!  London in the blitz!  London in the blitz with Greene’s new (and apparently dowdy) mistress!  He joins MI-6!  He is a spy in Africa!  He has his books made into big Hollywood movies!  He writes The Third Man, one of the best films of the century!  He writes The Heart of the Matter!  He gets another mistress!  And yet he still has his wife and the first mistress!  And he’s still Catholic!  He sails around on yachts in the Mediterrannean with famous people like Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh!  He corresponds with Evelyn Waugh!  He finally dumps his first mistress!  His wife refuses to divorce him!  He writes The End of the Affair!  He goes to Malaysia!  He goes to Vietnam while the French are at war with the Vietminh!  He smokes lots of opium!  He writes The Quiet American!  He goes to Africa again!  He is branded a Communist by US Immigration!  He founds, as a joke, the Anglo-Texan Society which actually thrived for over 20 years!

His life during this phase is so interesting.  By the end he’s become almost too famous for his own good.  While it means he regularly hobnobs with all sorts of other famous people, it can be bad when he’s out on his worldwide expeditions.  (When he goes to Africa to report on the Mau Mau Massacre, he just wants to get into the country and see what’s happening, but all the Brits want to have him for tea and chat with the famous author.)  It’s also when he wrote my favorites of his books.  (Except for Our Man in Havana, which I expect to come early in the 3rd volume.)  I would really love to re-read all three of the major works from this time, though I should probably wait a bit.  Sherry still tends to spend lots of time finding the sources for the books and so I practically relived the entire book of Quiet American because every little act’s origin is reproduced.  Although Sherry’s arguments about the source for Pyle, the naive American, are rather interesting.

I’m still not sure how much I love Sherry as a biographer.  But I have to say his style was much easier for me in this book.  He doesn’t go chronologically exactly, he tends to cover different elements of his life in different chapters.  In the first volume I often had trouble remembering what was happening when.  In this book it was much easier to get my bearings, and I liked that we got to see all the stuff about Vietnam all at once and then when it was over we’d go back and see what was going on with Catherine this whole time.

This period is really why I wanted to read the biography in the first place.  Greene’s infamous for his affair with Catherine Walston.  And seeing it in all its context was crazy.  She was married with five children (at least one of which was born during their long affair).  Greene would often spend the night with her at her home and the two of them would come out for breakfast with her husband.  When he finally decides he has to let go his wife and first mistress Dorothy, he seems quite agonized but not at all conflicted.  He seems to just accept that he is cruel to those he loves instead of making efforts to be better.  The all-out denial it must take to have relationships with three women simultaneously blows my mind, and yet he isn’t completely unaware of what he’s doing or else there wouldn’t be a book like The End of the Affair, in which he manages to both justify his actions and attack them.  A lot of the same issues show up in Heart of the Matter.  I wonder what it must have been like for his wife to read HotM and see how obviously it drew from her husband’s own life and hers and to know that it was being read by people all over the world.

Greene’s depressive temperament is also much more on display here.  In his youth he is so often enamored with some thing or other, but as an adult he has settled into it.  His letters to Catherine are often quite frightening.  And you can tell there’s a reason he writes about suicide as much as he does.

Yet, for all that, he really does seem to be happiest when he’s in some strange city elsewhere in the world.  Soon there will be Haiti and Cuba in the next volume (and with them Our Man in Havana and The Comedians, which I like a lot) and hopefully some of his later novels, which I don’t know very well.

As a side note, I am often asked what we’re naming the baby.  His name will in fact be Graham.  (Not Graham Greene, but he will have a G for his first and middle names, so he’ll get his own double G.)  He is not being named for Graham Greene, but I must admit that the amount of Greene I’ve read in the last five years certainly affected the way I think of the name.  It’s one I never would have considered a few years ago.  And being as literary as I am, I like that there is a slight literary source there.  When people see me reading the Greene biography, they often have no idea who he is.  I get that, it was a long time before I knew of him.  But it does make me a little sad that such a great writer is getting a little lost in history.

With all that said, recently when asked about the baby’s name, I said we were naming him Graham and the response was, “That’s a great name!  Like Graham Greene!”  To which I replied with surprise and pleasure, “Yes!  Exactly!”  Just so you know, this is the best response possible.  It made my day.  And I am still pleased about it several days later.

May

2

Get Thee to a Library

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After I run out of books on reserve at the library, sometimes I will end up with a glut not long afterwards.  I don’t know if it’s because I get less picky about what I reserve because I know I need books or if it’s just one of those ebb and flow things where sometimes there are just more interesting looking books that I come across.  Either way, I just hit a glut.  Not the worst timing, since I always like to have an ample stash for plane trips and I’ve got one coming up next week.

So far, I’ve only finished a couple of the new arrivals.  I reserved The Dead Father’s Club by Matt Haig because he has a new book out, I read the review and thought it could be good if the author was good but was undecided.  When this happens I’ll often find previous works and start with one that looks more appetizing to me and then decide how I like the writer.  The premise of Dead Father’s Club is not anything ingenious, but is nearly perfectly executed.  It is a retelling of Hamlet, changing the main character to 11-year-old Philip Noble.  Redoing Shakespeare often feels old-hat these days, but making one of the more ambiguous and strange characters in all of literature into a child made this book work so much better than most adaptations.

Hamlet often seems more like a teenager, with his inability to act or commit to anything.  But as an 11-year-old his inaction is much more understandable and interesting, he is overwhelmed by the world and what has happened to him and lacks the capacity to deal with it.  It helps that the book is wonderfully written.  (I have dumped many books with young 1st person narrators, who are often too precocious for their own good.)

It also helps that Haig doesn’t feel like he has to stick to the formula.  While eventually you get many of the main characters, you don’t get all of them.  This Hamlet has no Horatio to confide in, making him much more of a sad, lonely kid.  Philip’s dead father, who appears to him regularly throughout the book, is a major presence and provides the central mysteries of the novel.  When adapting a play which involves so much ambiguity, you have to keep that all there and this book certainly does.

Since it’s more of a crossover book (readable as both YA or adult literature) it’s not too heavy with the Hamlet references, but there were a few little ones now and then that made me chuckle.  For instance, when investigating how to kill his uncle, Philip reads a true crime book called “Murder Most Foul.”  Mostly I enjoyed how little I knew about where the book was going and what would happened.  It all felt quite new.  I would exhort you to Get thee to a library and get a copy.

The other new book I’ve finished is Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms.  Since last year when I went on an In Cold Blood frenzy, I’ve meant to read more of Capote’s fiction.  This was his first published novel, and it certainly fits in with the Southern gothic genre.  Overall, I don’t know how much I enjoyed the book.  But I loved little bits of it.  Capote is obviously a great writer, even when he was quite young, but I’d like to see more of his mature writings.  I would like to see if his books amount to more than a serious of lovely images.

With a long commute again I am back on audiobooks.  I am having trouble finding copies to reserve so I have ones ready that I like.  That’s how I ended up with A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs.  I like Burroughs, but I hadn’t been really interested in his newest memoir.  Partly because I feel like you should have a two-memoir max as a human being, partly because I thought his previous memoirs too good to be able to get another one equally good, and partly because it just didn’t sound like something I wanted to read.  Burroughs’ father is the major player here and he’s rarely played a role in any of his previous writings.

I didn’t like the way the audiobook was read, but that’s really personal preference.  Overall, after having read so much insanity from Burroughs before, the incidents in this book didn’t feel quite as awful.  Perhaps if I’d known nothing about him I would have found it more horrifying.  I certainly agreed by the end of the book that his father was something of a psychopath, but it seemed as though I should have believed something far worse.  I also felt like he left much of his father’s early life untouched, when it sounded like it could have been very interesting.  Many of the flaws were like this, some things should have been fleshed out, others dropped.  My honest reaction to it was remembering when I first heard the audiobook of Dry, his 2nd memoir, and by far my favorite.  It was such a lovely book to listen to, crazy and infuriating and sad, and hearing his voice again just made me wish I was listening to that instead.

We haven’t watched many movies lately.  I’ve been too busy.  But we did see Moon at the Atlanta Film Festival a couple weeks ago and really liked it.  It has all the elements you want of a good sci-fi space-epic-but-not kind of thing.  It had something of a twist, which you learned relatively early, but which continued to play out and stay interesting for the entire film.  Why can’t we get more good sci-fi movies like this?  The biggest distraction for me was knowing it was made by Duncan Jones, aka Zowie Bowie, and wanting to listen to “Space Oddity.”