Rabbit, Run by John Updike

 

Re-reading this in a concentrated effort, rather than how I read it in high school and college, where it might have taken ten days. (We watched most of the film version of WITCHES OF EASTWICK last week, and it got me in an Updike mood.) Updike's descriptive powers are murderously sharp - if often over-done - and I enjoyed the  tearing through the first 100 pages on a windy, dull Sunday afternoon.

Rabbit shoots hoops with kids, goes home and fights with his wife, goes to pick up his kid and his car, drives instead all night to South Carolina, drives back, stays the night in his high school baseball coach's room at the Y, goes on a double date w/ coach and goes home with hooker, starts living with hooker, begins a dialogue/golf friendship with his minister, Rev. Eccles.

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price. [140]

Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima

 

Slow, sprawling, unusual set piece from Mishima. More of a Henry James/Iris Murdoch exercise in character manipulation and inter-relationship than his usual dark, violent, compact narratives.

Crudo a novel by Olivia Lang

 

Free association and collage details, with a plot of "how life is anxiety-inducing." Reminds me somewhat of Renata Adler and SPEEDBOAT. not impressed thus far.

A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdock

 

Probably the fourth time I've read this. Always enjoyable. Murdock as puppet-master, destroying character's lives with other characters' malevolent gamesmanship. Cartoon-level drinking - women swill whiskey like it was water, semi-unbelievably. Most of the plot comes from dialogue.

The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme

 

Really dull, really annoying, occasional flashes of wry humor are completely buried in a mass of self-conscious, self important nonsense.

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

 

"Dimensions" is first, famous story - about a woman visiting her husband in prison, after he murdered their three children. Graceful, reconciliatory story that takes place sort of miraculous, against all odds.

my mop of black hair (the worst hair in the world for showing up in food, as the manager had warned me).  p.89, “Wenlock Edge”

"Fiction" "Wenlock Edge" 

"Deep-Holes" 

"Free Radicals" an elderly woman deals with a home intruder in a distracted way.

"Face" - a boy with a birthmark across his face.

"Some Women" 

"Child's Play" two girls at their summer camp take revenge on a disabled girl that one remembers from her childhood.

"Wood"

The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima

 

good, sort of Romeo and Juliet story, poor young fisherman woos the daughter of richest man in fishing village. very pretty, evocative, island and seascape setting, a lighthouse. Mishima's spare concentrated energy is satisfying.

Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross

 

Another winner, stranger, earlier novel by author of PLAYWORLD. Man is questioned by two detectives in the suspicious death of him wife. It is revealed that both detectives also has suspicious dead wives in their past.

Or is just in a book the man is writing that all of this is happening?

It's a puzzle book, and like PLAYWORLD, it ran too long for me. While in PLAYWORLD it was more descriptive and expanded long moments with many different characters, here the number of characters is limited. But I got lost in the puzzle.

Still, Ross is a gifted, powerful writer whom I will read again.

Below is the Escher illustration that serves well as the flyleaf to the book.

Open Secrets by Alice Munro

 

"Carried Away"

"A Real Life"

"The Albanian Virgin" - amazing, circuitous story of a woman lost in the forest of Albania.

"Open Secrets"

"The Jack Randa Hotel" - an abandoned women follows her husband to Australia.

"A Wilderness Station"

"Spaceships Have Landed" - girl lies about a sexual assault - or does she?

"Vandals" - vicious revenge.

Playworld by Adam Ross

 

Thick, long book - possibly too long - but I'm halfway through and digging it. Great schoolboy wrestling descriptions. NYC in 1980-1981.

Finished - exhausting, but Ross's lapidary prose style is not to be believed. I feel that several of the plot lines lost energy in his creation of such a sprawling bildungsroman that covers maybe two years tops, when the narrator is 14 until about 16.

Plots include narrator's seduction by a 36 year old woman (a family friend), his wrestling coach's sexual abuse, his parents' marriage seemingly about to dissolve, his TV star financial status as an actor on a popular series, his pining for an out-of-reach teenaged girl. And that's just some of them.

Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowry

 

"Re-" reading this after forty years. How did I even pretend to understand it at twenty years old? Lowry's prose is dense, elliptical, allusive, often semi-private. A late entry in the great modernist novels. But I'm having real trouble "finishing" it.

Friends of My Youth by Alice Munro

 

Despite her recent cancellation, Alice Munro is a genius. Going back and re-reading her now is stunning and numbing: her men are cruel and selfish, her women are passive and selfish, the northern landscape is bleak and cold, but other setting details are lavishly and lovingly rendered: interiors, trees, flowers, clothes, anything inanimate with color.

"Friend of My Youth"

"Five Points"

"Meneseteung"

"Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass"

"Oranges and Apples"

"Pictures of the Ice"

"Goodness and Mercy"

"Oh, What Avails"

"Differently"

"Wigtime"

The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

 

Ending up liking this quiet, calm novel about a Jewish Russian refusenik who served 13 years in a Soviet gulag after being betrayed by his Jewish friend and roommate. 

Refusenik visits Crimea and accidentally books a room in his betrayers house. 

Yid dreitzikh. A Jew gets by.