Tag: male writer

This book presents an alternate reality in which the Germans and Japanese won the second world war. It has some interesting parts: for example, it imagines the internal struggles after Hitler dies (who would it have been: Goebbels? Speer? The mind boggles); it imagines what the Nazis would have done to African people; it imagines what it would have been like if Japanese culture became American culture; and so on. Sounds like a good book, right? But actually it turned out kind of boring. It covers a bunch of characters who are doing a bunch of things, but you don’t really believe in any of them and they all seem kind of the same person.

While the book was dull, the Wikipedia entry on it was certainly not. Philip K Dick led a wild life. First off, there is the five wives. That is always a red flag. The third one (who he later involuntarily confined to a psychiatric institution, but never mind that), was the one who inspired this book, largely because he needed her to think he was working, so he needed her to hear him typing, so he started typing, and ended up with THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. He never made much money, and took a lot of speed, and then when he tried to get off speed didn’t go to NA or whatever like a normal person but entered a sort of cult (Syanon), and all this was before he started to have religious visions (triggered by light glinting off a stranger’s necklace). When he died he was buried under the tombstone pre-prepared for him 53 years before by his parents, who determined he should be buried next to his twin who died in infancy. None of the wives ojected. I mean: it all went on.

Okay: I am about ready to give it up for Jonathan Franzen, and concede he may indeed be America’s greatest living novelist.  Because this thing is LIT.

It tells the story of a nuclear family, over a period of about a year, from each of their perspectives (mom, dad, son, daughter, other son).  From pg1, I was in. We open in

. . . the nursing home in Hinsdale, where the mingling smells of holiday pine wreaths and geriatric feces reminded him of the Arizona high country latrines. .

MWAHAHAHA.  The father is a deputy minister at a Protestant church.  He feels a sad kinship with the “dusty creche steer,” and is conducting an awkward flirtation with a parishioner.  He is generally terrible at it, though he does get her to accept some vinyl records from him.

 “He was not so bad at being bad as to not know what sharing music signified.”

Later he finally manages to get it together with his parishioner.

With a sigh, she closed her eyes and put her hand between his legs.  Her shoulders relaxed as if feeling his penis made her sleep.  “Here we are.”

It might have been the most extraordinary moment of his life. 

The book is so incredibly well observed (‘that type of disinfectant unique to dentist’s office’ I mean god does he carry a notebook EVERYWHERE), so impressive in its creation of different points of view, so successful in concluding everyone’s arcs, I am just like DAMN

According to my blog, when I read a previous novel of his, FREEDOM, I was so overcome that I stopped on p38 to write a blog post about how much I already loved it.  This was back in 2011, and it’s probably a good thing  it was a while ago, because that book, like this, is a novel of a single nuclear family.  I’d probably be able to see more of the authors tricks and obssessions and so be less impressed. As it is, let me just say again, DAMN.

For some reason I had the impression that colonialism in North America was less bloody than in Africa, involving more diseased blankets and deceptive treaties and less outright murder. I learnt how wrong I was at the Akta Lakota Museum in South Dakota. The massacre at Wounded Knee is as stomach-churning a use of guns on unarmed people as anything Kitchner did in Sudan. I bought this book there, as the back cover told me Welch is a relatively important Native American writer.

It’s about a young man who goes on a bender while looking for the girlfriend who has left him. I wish I could say I enjoyed it but it’s profoundly not my kind of book. First of all, it’s clearly a boys’ book. I can’t defend this definition, other than to say I know them when I see them. Second, it has one of those motive-less protagonists so beloved of midcentury fiction. If even the protagonist doesn’t care what they are doing, I find it hard to do so myself.

Let me give you a taste:

First Raise got us each a cup of coffee and watched us drink. It was beginning to get light. He loved us. He watched us drink the bitter coffee down. In the living room beside the oil stove, my grandmother snored. Beneath the closed door leading off the kitchen, Theresa slept or didn’t sleep.

Perhaps there are some people who don’t find this annoying. If so, I am not one of them.

A story of a love triangle in small town Texas. And when I say small, I mean small. When there are only about two women in the whole place, and one of them is ugly, you can see where the triangle gets more likely.

It’s told in three sections, one for each person in the triangle. Wikipedia tells me McMurtry was married twice, both times to women, which surprises me because on the evidence of this book I would say he had never met a woman. The girl’s section of the book was just bizarre. It is clear throughout which man she ought to have married, and she chooses the other, and so I thought her section would be a ‘reveal.’ What it revealed is that McMurtry thinks women are basically irrational, don’t know what’s good for them, and can’t explain their own thought process.

That said, I still liked the book. The charm is in the setting, as with other books of his that I’ve read ( LONESOME DOVE, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (minus the cow-rape of course)). Try this, on a hailstorm:

I guess the worst was Old Man Hurshel Monroe getting his skull cracked outside the door of the bank. They say Beulah Monroe found the hailstone that conked him and kept it home in the icebox for nearly ten years, till one of her grandkids ate it for an all-day sucker.

Or this, the very opening of the book:

When I woke up Dad was standing by the bed shaking my foot. I opened my eyes, but he never stopped shaking it. He shook it like it was a fence post and he was testing it to see if it was in the ground solid enough. All my life that’s the way he’d wake me up—I hated it like poison. Once I offered to set a glass of water by the bed, so he could pour that over me in the mornings and wake me up, but Dad wouldn’t do it. I set the water out for him six or seven times, and he just let it sit and shook my foot anyway. Sometimes though, if he was thirsty, he’d drink the water first.

I googled the author and found him to be a rather charming man. I love his transactional approach to writing. Try this:

If I could not write another word of fiction and make a living, I would. But I can’t. I live off of fiction, mostly. I have a novel coming out this year, Loop Group, and I have one more novel that I owe Simon and Schuster, about an aging gunfighter. I’m getting close to thirty novels in all, I think. That’s a lot of novels. It’s kind of embarrassing. I don’t even offer them to my friends anymore. They all stopped reading at fifteen or twenty. When a new one comes out, I think, “Do I really want to mail this one around?”

An unusual novel about compromise and friendship. It’s about a pair of married couples who become friends in their twenties, and follows their relationships across their lives

It’s about the fact that some people live their best lives, and some people don’t. It’s also about the subtler point that it is hard to know which category you fall in.

The husband in one couple becomes an author. The husband in the other couple would like to, but ends up a university lecturer. This is in part because his wife, who has far more energy and ambition than he does, is convinced he should do this ‘first’ before he tries the uncertain life of a poet. Seems reasonable. However he failures to get tenure, which sends his wife into a breakdown. I mean on the one hand one has to agree with the character who tells her to ‘renounce this dramatization of failure,’ but my other suggestion would be HOW ABOUT SOCIETY JUST LETS HER GET HER OWN JOB. Honestly, can you imagine how messed up things were in the early twentieth century when half the population had to try and live out the suppressed dreams of the other half?

This whole question of ‘failure’ is an interesting one. Here is the author husband:

Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals? We’re all decent godless people, Hallie. Let’s not be too hard on each other if we don’t set the world afire. There’s already been enough of that.

This is my third novel of Stegner’s, and I am inspired to keep going. He is a lovely writer. Enjoy this description of a hillside:

The air smells of cured grass, cured leaves, distance, the other side of hills.

I wonder how long it took him to come up with that.