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.

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.