Spartina by John Casey

 

RIP John Casey. A great novel, reminds me of Thomas McGuane without as much drugging and screwing.

The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor

 

Great novel about jazz and life and, well, a bear who blows an intense jazz saxophone and screws women and goes to jail and ponders all of life with a delicious, dark, rueful energy.

Redheard by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

 

Thought this was going to be about a redhead, but as the cover shows, a fire hydrant is the only redhead (so far).

Also, predictable Tyler story, comfortable, well-worn, quiet insights. Least amount of plot ever.

Effortless to read. Lesser work.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

 

Okay time travel book, if a little bit overblown prose style. The 1840s-era Arctic exploring ships details are the most vivid.

The Ministry of Time is set in near future UK.  A time travel "door" has been discovered time travel, and the Ministry performs experiments on its effects on humans, by taking historical figures from the verge of death and bringing them to the present.

The narrator's voice and POV are a little melodramatic. She falls in love with her historic figure, Graham, Arctic sailor who is hot and also Victorian-repressed.

The two gay characters are most interesting - Maggie from the 1600s who speaks in a delightful Shakespearean patois, and Arthur, rescued from the trenches of WWI (I think).

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

 

Crazy sci-fi plot - a woman discovers that she can get a new husband and life by sending her current husband to the attic, where there is a brief glow of light and then a new husband descends - and the pictures in her flat change, the furniture and books and wall paint colors change, and the messages on her phone change, and her relationships change.

Wacky. But Gramazio makes some excellent points about desire and need, as the woman favors some husbands and discards others, loses many husbands by consciously sending them up - and others by mistake.

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.

Then back to wife when she gives birth to daughter, and back home with her, then gets shut down for sex, and leaves, and wife starts drinking again and drowns newborn in tub accidentally. Then Rabbit returns to her side, but after funeral, runs away again.

The prose is a little much, too ornate, too brilliant, hard to reconcile the omniscient narrator's brilliant genius synthesizing tone and world view with Rabbit's (and other characters') much more limited and pedestrian views.

Still, a stunning book, and, I imagine, in 1960, a shock to the system of literature.

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

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks. [208]

You couldn't bear to love anybody might return it. [245]

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 Murdoch

 

Probably the fourth time I've read this. Always enjoyable. Murdoch (rather late in the game revealed to be a concentration camp survivor) as puppet-master, his malevolent gamesmanship, destroying character's lives through their own vanity with other characters' vanity . 

The diabolical Julius sending Morgan's old love letters to him (Julius) to the noble husband Rupert - and Rupert's old love letters to his noble wife Hilder on to Morgan - just too satisfying. He creates their brief love affair out of their own self-regard and vanity.

Cartoon-level drinking - women swill whiskey like it was water, semi-unbelievably. Most of the plot comes from dialogue.

There are times when one's just got to go on loving somebody helplessly, with blank hope and blank faith. When love just is hope and faith in their most denuded form. Then love becomes almost impersonal and loses all its attractiveness and its ability to console. But it is just then that it may exert its greatest power. It is just then that it may be really be able to redeem. Love has its own cunning beyond our conscious wiles. [p. 18]

Good is dull. What novelist ever succeeded in making a good man interesting? . . .  

Evil on the contrary, is exciting and fascinating and alive. It is also very much more mysterious than good. Good can be seen through. Evil is opaque. [205]

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.