Tag: male writer

STOP TIME by Frank Conroy

Do I really need another coming of age story from an American man?  Apparently so. I’ve enjoyed this one.  Mostly, it reminded me of how boring childhood used to be.  I know people talk about it a lot, but this memoir really brought back to me what it was like before phones and television. God, we were bored.  And I had my cousins and a library card, so I was not even as bored as this guy, who had neglectful parents and a shack in Florida. 

I am always awed/frightened by the idea of memoir.  Imagine sitting down and actually trying to recall your childhood?  It feels frighteningly impossible and also frighteningly possible.  This deep in some Pandora box territory.  I also really don’t like the idea of fixing the past into my specific narrative about it.  I think the past does best when it is constantly changing, just like the future.   That said, please enjoy this baller analysis of his step dad:

“Because for all his knocking around his view of the world was incredibly naïve.  He believed important jobs were handed out in nightclubs by impulsive millionaires and that he was the sort of man they might be given to.  Spoiled all his life . . . he deeply believed that the good things in life were given to one.  Food, clothing, and the bare necessities had to be earned, but after that it was a question of being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right people or simply being lucky.  It never occurred to Jean to work hard anything except menial labour.  He was always above his work, the secret possessor of an inner wealth untouched by the world – his image of himself.” 

I came to this book from seeing that David Foster Wallace said it was the book that made him want to be a writer.  I just love author’s recommendations of other authors.  It’s sad this was only available in second-hand.     

TRAIN DREAMS by Denis Johnson

Well this is an almost depressingly fantastic novella. It’s an eerie and beautiful story about a railway worker in Idaho in the early twentieth century.

It’s kind of frustrating for anyone to be this amazing as a writer. I looked him up and I see that he was widely acknowledged as the ‘big talent’ of his generation of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. I note I must be a bad person because I was almost relieved (!?!) to see he became a drug addict. He still went on to write more though, and apparently this is not even his best book! That is apparently something called JESUS SON. I haven’t ordered it yet because I almost dread finding out how good it is.

A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN by David Foster Wallace

I guess other people have noticed that David Foster Wallace is a good writer, but damn. I don’t even especially like essay collections, and still: damn. To be fair, I did skip a couple of the essays that seemed boring, but the ones I read were wonderful, especially the one about his time on a cruise ship.

Some of his descriptions are so perfect I think of them often. As for example a wide sky with “one or two clouds always in the distance, as if for scale,” and then later in the day the clouds “begin very slowly interacting like jigsaw pieces, and by evening the puzzle will be solved and the sky will be the colour of old dimes.” Or Montreal’s “EKG skyline.” Or when he could not see a powerpoint presentation because the room he was in was “so abundantly fenestrated.”

When are descriptions ever so interesting!?! This cruise essay is chock a block with ideas. Cruises he says “appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but I mean like age-50+ people, for who their own mortality is something more than an abstraction.” As someone nearly 50+, I can only say: ouch.

And on the ship itself:

“It’s not an accident they’re all so white and clean, for they’re clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decay-action of the sea”

It’s also very funny. Try:

“Since so many of my shipmates shout, I make it a point of special pride to speak extra-quietly to crewmen whose English is poor”

I had a vague memory that he killed himself, and Wikipedia tells it was even before he had a chance to get to that 50+. I couldn’t tell you why, but as well as being clever and funny and beautifully written this essay was just overwhelmingly sad.

THE REST OF OUR LIVES by Ben Markovitz

This book was shortlisted for the Booker, which made me hesitant. Typically the Booker indicates a book I will hate. But I decided to give it a go, because I loved the pitch: a man goes to drop his daughter off at college, and then just keeps driving.

It’s turns out to be a book about how weirdly free you are in the second half of your life; probably free-er than you were when you were young, and were burdened by having to make money and be a success and get married and oh god I feel stressed just thinking about it.

There was tons of stuff I really liked about this book. Here’s the daughter, arriving in her college town for her first day:

The city she had visited once before was about to become a permanent four-year landmark in her life story, and in the face of that fact you’re kind of helplessly the person you were beforehand.

And here is the dad, meeting a friend who he hasn’t seen in years:

If I looked hard I could see, under his old face, the shape of someone more elderly starting to push through

And here was one that made me really laugh, about what happened to be on the TV:

. . . Friends seemed to be on back to back. It’s like the weather these days, always going on in the background.

I’m sorry to tell you that he does actually escape SPOILER ALERT because he gets weird chest pains and it turns out he has a heart issue so his wife flies out to get him. And then the book abruptly ends. I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean, but it’s been haunting me.

BUCKEYE by Patrick Ryan

Here is a classic American novel set in a small town in Ohio. It follows two married couples across a few decades. I was enjoying it, until I wasn’t. I got to page 382 and then abruptly decided to quit. It’s hard to explain why. It was well written, it had a plot, but somehow it just seemed very ordinary, and like my reading time would be better spent elsewhere. Can’t think when else I’ve quite a book this late on this slender a reasoning.

WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan

On the one hand, I did not finish this book. I bailed about 200 pages in. On the other hand, I kind of enjoyed it. It tells the story of a professor of literature in 2130, whose specialist period is 1990 to 2030.

The first interesting part was how overwhelmed he is, and the whole academy is, by how much material our era left. The reality TV, the emails, the messaging, etc etc. Its wild how much more info we leave behind than people before the internet.

The second interesting part was the world. It is a globally warmed world, so the UK is just a series of islands, and they have very few species – just eight butterflies. Its not as if the professor does not know how good the past was, but it’s not as if he thinks he lives in a dystopia. And it made me wonder: we all know we live in a very reduced natural world; how strange we don’t think we live in a dystopia.

It’s also a post-nuclear war world, so there is very little global trade. They look back on our world as a world of wild and extravagant luxury. So perhaps we should think we live in a utopia. I don’t know.

The plot was kind of questionable, all about trying to find a lost poem, and at some point we switched back into our present with the poet, so maybe it was all going to make sense, but I can’t tell you as I gave up.

JOURNEYS OF A GERMAN IN ENGLAND: A WALKING TOUR OF ENGLAND IN 1782 by Carl Philip Moritz

Okay this one killed me. It was just so incredibly charming. It is the real letters of a young German who visited England in 1782. And et me tell you, he is LOVING it. Sample this from the day of his arrival:

“How different did I find these living hedges, the green of them and of the trees – this whole paradisical region – from ours and all others I have seen! How incomparable the roads! How firm the pathway beneath me!”

It rejoices in chapter headings like “Richmond: A Perfect Town.” He finds the street lighting amazing; though apparently this wasn’t just him – a German prince who was there shortly before found it so unusual that he assumed they had illuminated the town just for him.

Weirdly I just read another book by a young man who went on a long walk – Laurie Lee’s WHEN I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING, and it has just the same vibe. While I was impressed that Laurie Lee could relax just by looking at the view (no podcast, nothing), I was even more impressed by Moritz who relaxes by reading Milton. What could make you chill out like PARADISE LOST?

It was a deeply charming window into 18th century London. For example, apparently it took so long to get from the mouth of the Thames to London that most travellers got off at the coast and took a carriage. The river was so busy that you always knew where it was because of the forest of masts.

But to be honest the appeal was not so much the historic fact, as it was the joy and enthusiasm of this young man, dead these two hundred years.

ALL THE WORST HUMANS by Phil Elwood


Here is a memoir about working at the sketchiest end of what is already a sketchy industry, i.e, PR.  The author has spent a career shilling for dictators.  He was a big debater in high school, and it shows.  He thinks he is just so terribly clever.  The book was kind of interesting e.g., I learnt the horrifying fact that there are 300K publicists vs only 40K journalists in the US, and that a PR firm exists who took $18.8M from Saudia Arabia to try and spin the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.  But it was also kind of boring, because its just a litany of ways he tried to spin stuff that he thinks is very clever. I’m not sure they are that clever, I just think the list of people willing to do this stuff is not very long so the competition is not very steep. 

One part I did find interesting was the weekend he spent in Vegas trying to make sure that Gaddafi’s son, Muatsaem, did not do anything newsworthy.  It was wild to see how completely unhingedly entitled this guy was, down to beating hotel maids for trying to clean.  And how wildly unhappy.  I also enjoyed his visit to Nigeria, where he goes to try and massage the kidnapping of the Chibok girls.  Try this:

” “The whole world just found out where Nigeria is on a map because of these kidnappings,” I say.  “Everyone is watching you. You need to do something about this problem.”

“Problem?” an official asks.”

Everything about this is hilarious.  As if Nigeria was unknown to the world because this PR guy didn’t know about it.  And I just love the profoundly Nigerian reply, as if a few hundred more kidnappings is not that big deal, which, to be fair, it is not, in the larger scheme of the security situation in the North.  Also of interest to me was that he stayed in the Abuja Hilton, a place I have myself stayed for many months, and also noted the oil men, prostitutes, etc.  Strangely he was very stressed out by it.  I guess if you’ve never even heard of Nigeria before the Abuja Hilton is quite an introduction.

I also learnt something we should all recall, which is that in PR you should never state a negative. Apparently the first phrase that Americans think of when they think of Richard Nixon is ‘I am not a crook,’ which is something he said.  This is a classic example of accepting the wrong framing. You should always say ‘I am a good man,’ or ‘I love America’ and etc. 

One last thing, the writing is often sharp and funny.  He has a friend who is very Republican.  Here’s the friend explaining:

“Nobody who doesn’t have a generator and two years’ worth of food in their garage outflanks me on the right.”  Says the author: “I describe him as ‘authoritarian-curious’”

I love that phrase!  Perfectly describes these decadent rich people who don’t understand what democracy has given them.

STARTER FOR TEN by David Nicholls

I really enjoyed this author’s new book, YOU ARE HERE, so thought I would give his first one a try.  He’s a skilled guy, but for me it was a bit meh.  This is partly I guess because he has grown as a writer, which is interesting to see.  This one, like YOU ARE HERE, is lightly comic, but it has much less heart. 

Perhaps also I was slightly put off by the subject matter, being an account of an awkward young man’s first year at university.  Not that this is not good subject matter, but let’s be real, it’s been done a lot.  Many authors historically have been men, and awkward men at that, so they’ve had a lot to tell us about that experience.  So the bar is high.  Side bar, I note I have also read many accounts of men losing their virginity to prostitutes. I have yet to read one by the prostitute. Any suggestions? 

MARTIN DRESSLER by Steven Millhauser

Here is a Pulitzer-winning book that I despised.  This just goes to show how incredibly personal taste in fiction is, because it is not easy to win the Pulitzer, and objectively speaking I can see that this is good writing, but god, I just found it irritating. It has a lot of lists.  I don’t think there is any object in nineteenth century New York he does not list.  I guess this could be called dense world building. I found it annoying.  It tells about a young man who has a drive for success and gets rich off building hotels while mysteriously marrying a woman who is obviously unsuited to him.   I mean: why?  I could not get it.  I’d also whacked my head hard on a car door and was icing it for much of the reading so perhaps that came into it.