So if you read Wolf in White Van the strange dreamlike narration that this novel closes with will not be a surprise. Throughout most of the book, we have a third person narrator who is more or less omniscient in perspective, but as the “mystery” at the center closes in the focus tightens, and we close with a first person narration that circles around more knowingly. See what I did there? I kind of said a lot knowing what I meant, but not really explaining to […]
The Fool Monty
Play this song first: I am just a little too old to have enjoyed these books when they first came out. So a lot of their charm isn’t…..lost on me per se, but it fails me a little. Also, sometimes my life is a little too stressful to deal with books of pure stress, even if that’s kind of the point over all. It’s weird because I can handle all kinds of terrible stuff happening to all kinds of characters, but for some reason the […]
Can I live?
There’s nothing true about this play that I didn’t say about the others. It’s well-written and the language is so perfectly captured I can hear it being said as I read. And like the other plays, something I didn’t mention, because it was originally cast with a couple of well-known actors, I can even imagine it being performed with specific faces and specific voices. This is the earliest, by chronology, of August Wilson’s Century Cycle, taking place in 1904. Like I mentioned in the Faulkner […]
I ain’t no Black Widow nothing!
I finally got the weird middle aged man at the library to talk with me. He’s mostly kind of chilly, but when I came up with an armload of August Wilson plays, it worked for him. He told me all about how people have been checking out his plays recently, how he read about Denzel Washington’s directorial choices for the new movie, all kinds of stuff. I really like reading the cast lists for these plays from the 1980s. In this one, we had Charles […]
Distortion for the effect of design
I don’t know about the Great American Novel. But I do know about great American novels, and especially books that so fully capture the experience of a time and a place and an identity. I think Moby Dick is the great American 19th century novel. It has everything (except women) to say about what America is, contains, and says it in both perfectly and multivalent ways. This book is the same for the 20th century. And I would argue, quite possibly for the 21st century. I […]
Love in a moving carriage, living it up while you’re feeling down.
I think I am done for awhile on the whole Flaubert kick. Sorry Julian Barnes. When I was in high school I had a huge obsession with a girl who mostly liked me back but also had a boyfriend. In study hall she would read Madame Bovary in French and pass me notes from it. It’s weird because a combination of this weird history of it and it’s reputation as smut (in that it was banned publicly etc) I got the impression it was basically Tropic of […]
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