In The Early Times by Tad Friend

 

Good. Weird. Pretentious.

A brilliantly written and odd book, mostly a memoir and an autobiographic essay by career New Yorker writer Tad friend, but verging at times on crystalline fiction, on sappy self-help relationship book, as furtive apologia by an unreliable narrator who cheats repeatedly on his wife, and finds in his father's life both a justification and a source of blame for this.

Friend's Wasp-y background -- born and raised in New England, his father a distinguished East Asian Studies professor an author and president of Swarthmore, a preppy education and avocations (Tad was a nationally ranked squash player - as was his father) -- this chill and chilly background is at odds with Friend's confessional intention.

If you love a demanding task that requires both discipline and talent...-- you eventually discover an innate boundary: you can apprehend real virtuosity, especially as it's used to best you, but you can never quite incorporate it. You will never be more than almost great...Yet the truly great players sacrifice so much that they stare back at us with equal longing. Or so we console ourselves. [115]

"Oversight" is a Janus word, like "buckle" or "cleave": it means both supervision and neglect [122]

'Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.' - James Salter [128]

'Think well on this, my sweet:

Our bodies need not truly beat 

Upon each other,

But, past their funerary heat.

Will slide together perfectly,

Grain and micrograin

Intimate and without stain,

Closer than ever they were in life.' -Day Friend (Tad's father) [155]

The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry

 

Another winner from Barry, this one from 1988, so the earliest of his work that I've read. A Sligoman is caught between nationalist and royal sides in the Irish civil war, given a death sentence, and flees, effectively banished for life. He returns several times, though, unable to completely leave home, which eventually kills him.

In Eneas, Barry has created a memorable, gentle, conflicted character torn on all sides by family, country, spirit, goodness, and evil.

Some words have no tune for themselves. [13]

... it strikes him that any person alive in the world, any person putting a shoulder against a life, no matter how completely failing to do the smallest good thing, is a class of hero. [130]

... the peculiar clock of God, whose divisions seem both unending and brief in the same span... [130]

He passes a number of bottles with thick blue glass and the faces of people he knows etched in them... whole "dying" passage at end of novel, [307-308]

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

 

Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan

 

Good, pungent book. The story of a friendship between two Scottish men broken into two parts: Summer, 1986 and Autumn, 2017. The first half is a trip to Manchester for a concert, and is rip-roaring and drunken, loaded with 18 year old full of themselves and life and bristling with arrogant comic knowledge of a world they barely. The second half, thirty years later, is sobering, to see the least.

Almost all references are insular to UK 1980s pop, American mid-century films, and English literature. Didn't know half of them, but they still gave me a kick.

But found it an abrupt book, something missing from the center, and what happened in the intervening years. Still, O'Hagan a gifted stylist and dialogue-ist. Will seek out more of his work.

They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again. [121]

"'The past isn't really the past, Tully said. 'It's just music, books, and films.'" [p. 244]

Absolution by Alice McDermott

 

Liked this, although there's a cautiousness and a certain smugness to (both) the narrator's voices that I dislike. The first half of the book feels like it's heading toward a more dramatic ending that I got, and the switching of narrators between the older woman and the younger woman does not yield significant unveilings of meaning or narrative.

Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska by Warren Zanes

 

Great book! That rare thing, penetrating writing about music.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

 

Must have read this before but don't really remember it. It's interesting but seems to be an early (1963) experiment in Vonnegut's more mature and radical books Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions.

The fantastical human-based religion of Bokonism, the short chapters that always end with a flair (if not much narrative oomph), the sci-fi flirtation of the doomsday weapon ice-nine, are all elements to be perfected later.