The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

A Sport and a Pasttime by James Salter

The celebrated 1968 "short" novel (187 pgs in my edition, although it feels much longer than that, and in a good way) is dense and lingering and smacked full of the senses.  At once a love story and a travelogue of "old France," it features the lovers Dean (a Yale dropout) and Anne-Marie (a French waitress), and a probing, poetic third person narrator who at onces describes their affair in sensual,emotional detail and also seems to be fantasizing into existence, in the same moment.

Begs re-reading, like any good poem, since I had that rushed feeling reading it (like poetry) that only halfway through was I truly begin to understand it narratively, and so need to go back and revisit both the heightened language, the emotional tone, and the plot of it all.

Singular.  Nabokov crossed with John O'Hare.  France seems an infinitely enchanted and endless place.

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut

Was so excited to read this, nostalgic, read Updike's more general appreciation of Vonnegut in his Hugging The Shore and thought I'd really missed something.

Missed nothing.  A terrifically slight book, I thought. Read it in about two hours, felt almost nothing.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

A brilliant book about war.  I was slow to warm up to Kevin Power's prose, as it is knotty and cerebral, we follow the narrator's complicated thoughts of guilt, complicity,choice and mortality, as he struggles to find meaning in memory of his Iraq tour, the death of his friend Murph, the strength and ferocity of their leader, Sergeant Sterling.  But the last fifty pages or so really tightened for me and I was left astonished, saddened and uplifted at the same time.

The rest is history, they say.  Bullshit, I say.  It's imagination or it's nothing, and must be, because what is created in this world, or made, can be undone, unmade; the threads of a rope can be unwoven.  And if that rope is needed as a guideline for a ferry to a farther shore, then one must invent a way to weave it back, or there will be drownings in the streams that cross our paths.  I accept now, though in truth it took some time, that must must be its own permission.

This sort of consciousness, a voice searching for moral reason and ethical sense and metaphysical reassurance, is dense on every single page of the novel.  And at the same time, constantly present in his prose, beautiful, vivid, haunting concrete physical description of two worlds -- Iraq, and rural southern Virginia -- that never ever meet and yet somehow, in Power's vision, are fused, confused, refused, and unresolved.

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro

Her stories seems shorter and more obscure to me suddenly.

This is How You Lose Her: Stories by Junot Diaz

Not very moved by this collection of stories.  Following Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies might just be too much a task for a human.

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

The staggering achievement of Hilary Mantel's most recent novels about Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII of England can not be exaggerated.

The emotional sweep of Cromwell's inner life, the historical intricacy of the cultural and economic moment of the time period, and how that moment defines and limits hundreds of major and minor characters from the era:  all are utterly unique.  Certainly, Mantel cites sources and has talked about the importance of several texts -- the same core history that Shakespeare essentially mines for his history places -- in creating the narratives, but what she has done in imagining the time from Cromwell's point of view is a triumph of poetry and wit and dramatic tension.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin

Toibin is a beautiful devious prose writer:  his sentences begin simply and keep going, becoming more like whole paragraphs or even pages, multi-layered narration and impression and character organically blending.

City of Bohane by Kevin Barry

The Passage meets Clockwork Orange meets Ulysses meets Road Warrior meets The Gangs of New York.  Stunning book.  Poetry via fiction.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Big Ray by Michael Kimball

Flat, unaffected, declarative sentences and paragraphs, no chapters, structure partitioned by an asterisk centered alone a line. First person narration, son recalling his father's death and troubled relationships, starting from hearing about the father's death, working back in the past to his father's earliest days, and moving forward a bit to narrator and sister arranging for memorial service.

The narrative was interesting at most -- Big Ray, the father, grows into a 500-pound, abusive, damaged and damaging father.  His marriage crumbles, secrets of his physical, emotioned sexual abuse of his children and wife slowly leak out.

I was curiously unmoved.  Found the unaffected delivery wearying and deadening over time.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Foundation

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

The hardest part of quitting [cigarettes] would be the loss of narrative function...
 
I am torn about this novel, as it's a perfectly-pitched first person story of a young poet on a fellowship in Spain.  Lerner's sentences are flawless.  He creates a diamond-sharp interior consciousness for his narrator, Adam, who is at once intellectually brilliant and social moronic, intensely perceptive and cruel, profound, petty, loathesome and compelling.

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

Could be sub-titled, A Self-Conscious Portrait of the Self-Conscious Artist as a Self-Conscious Young Man.  In Spain.  On Hash.

The prose is mesmerizing, and is all about distance from experience and the problem of language, and the problem of translation, and about the insecurities and indecisions of an artist, and all of this adds to a fairly astonishingly large achievement of poetic voice and diction.

But is this a confessional masked as an aesthetic treatise?  Will we ever know?  Does it even matter?  When I read this:  I opened my eyes a little more widely than normal, opened them to a very specific point, raising my eyebrows and also allowing my mouth to curl up into the implication of a smile.  I held this look steady once it had obtained, a look that communicated incredulity cut with familiarity, a boredom arrested only by a vaguely anthropological interest in my surroundings, a look that contained a dose of contempt I hoped could be read as political...

and then see the author's picture on the right, I become confused and it agitates my reading.


cowardice of your convictions

...that nothing was more American, whatever that means, then fleeing the American...


But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where "poem" is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures;...

By Blood by Ellen Ullman

The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle

An unusual, ungainly novel about mental illness and human solidarity that gathers force in its powerful conclusion.

"the devil in silver" (which we learn, late in the game, and awkwardly via exposition from a minor, is a term for an chemical poisoning affliction silver miners suffered from in the late 19th century) here is a half-mythological, half-real resident of a mental hospital in Queens, NY which other patients have witnessed and been attacked by over many years.

Pepper, a 42 year old neer-do-well gets unjustly committed to the hospital for threatening his girlfiend's ex.  a strapping 6 foot three, large and powerful man, he is quickly unhinged and diminished by the hospital's heavy prescription of haldol and lithium.

other patients -- the elderly Dorry, the "mother" of the ward, the teenaged Loochie, Pepper's roommate Coffee, and a well-sketched cast of more minor character patients -- band with Pepper in a demented, helpless, hopeless and eventually successful attempt to subdue "the devil in silver."

Certainly there are elements to the "horror" genre to the story, since "the devil" is literarlly a demented isolated mental patient hiding in the ceiling tours, who looks alternately like a bison and a crazy old man, but Lavalle's book is just to multi-dimensional and culturally alert and busts right out the schlock horror conventions.  Lavalle revistits the desitution and failure of the American mental health treatment of the poor and forgotten -- his gentle, ribald and clever attention to a host of patients (and the pathetic staff of the hospita) make a much larger accomplishment here.

Despite some awkwardness in the prose, including occasional jarring shifts in the point of view, which is chiefly Pepper throughout, the novel has a wonderful idiomatic control and depth to it.  I found it amazing, in the end.

Carry The One by Carol Anshaw.

A novel that, after several brief initial chapters on a wedding and a tragic car accident following, follows the lives of the occupants of the car that kills a 10 year old girl, including the life of the drunken driver.

Very strong.  At times over the years the guilty connection between the car occupants and the increasingly-distant catastrophe victim grow tenuous, but Anshaw completes each of the five lives she follows so densely one begins to forget the accident itself.

Anshaw is witty and has a compelling eye for detail.  Mostly set in Chicago, the narrative covers 30 years, from the early 80s until shortly after 9/11.  

A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

What to say about this exalted book?  Enormous, sweeping, gifted, culturally alluring, multi-dimensional, thickly embroidered, each page is chock-full of surprising language, unique turns of phrase, stunning metaphor.