Drop City by TC Boyle
“The morning was a fish in a net, glistening and wriggling at the dead black border of her consciousness, but she’d never caught fish in a net or on a hook either, so she really couldn’t really say if or how or why.” I read this years ago, and I more or less liked it, but I don’t think I understood it much. Or rather, it’s a perfectly understandable novel, but maybe you need some of the cynicism and realism of your 30s to seep […]
Beyond the 100th Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner
“This book is an attempt to write a biography that is the history not of a personality but of a career.” I am not from the West and have spent almost no time there, except through books and movies and one trip to California, where I flew over most of it. I also wasn’t sure about Wallace Stegner as an historian, as he’s primarily a novelist, who once wrote in the voice of an historian. Regardless, we learn very early on that he’s been enlisted into […]
The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss
This is a decidedly tender novel that I wasn’t exactly expecting to be as good as it is. For one thing, I just read some Louis Auchincloss nonfiction, and while his thinking is very strong in those essays, the writing itself felt too pedestrian or pragmatic. But here, the language is very strong, lively, and breathed with spirit. Perhaps it’s the change in form or just the 25 years in between. The novel is also unexpected in its form. We meet a young teacher on […]
Dangling Man by Saul Bellow
“There was a time when people were in the habit of addressing themselves frequently and felt no shame at making a record of their inward transactions.” This is a reread from a few years ago. This novel takes place in 1941 and is specifically in the form of a diary by a man who is married and somewhat disheveled at the soul-level. What this means here is a feeling of unease and displacement as he goes through his days. The specific nature of this displacement […]
Snow White by Donald Barthelme
“She is a tall dark beauty containing a great many beauty spots” I wasn’t sure what a reread of this book was going to bring me. But I did it. The reread did go better than the initial one, but I am not sure I liked it any better when it comes down to it. This book is a retelling of Snow White, but with a lot of artifice and structure stripped out of it. So this postmodern rendering of it is often told in […]
The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott
“Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south.” The beginning of A Passage to India begins with an […]
