Beatlebone by Kevin Barry

Disappointing.  I was expected the sort of completely organic fiction of City of Bohane, with its marvelous imagination of an Ireland in the dystopian future.

Instead, Beatlebone is a treacly "what if?" narrative, as in, what if Barry could get inside John Lennon's head during his broken-down years of 1975-1978?  So we get JL's vaunted scream therapy, we get JL's memories of his beloved mother and his hated father, we get JL's public voice, punny, funny and angry, all set down in a lyrical Irish landscape of the West Coast and western islands.  We got a bizarre late chapter in which Barry writes in first person of his teasing attempts to lace his notes with the real, and a journal of his own visit to JL's supposed Irish island.  We got a late short chapter of JL speaking/singing/rhapsodizing into a microphone of his own stream of consciousness for his great lost ficitional album Beatlebone that he dreamed up on the island.

But the whole thing, frankly, was an effort to read.  Disappointed!

It does make me want to listen to JL's Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey songs.  But it does not make me want to read more Barry, for now.

The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams

A Wild Swan and Other Tales by Michael Cunningham

The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Frustrating and a front-loaded effort for me, as I did not love her first prose poems book, and feel reverse-victimized as the toady privileged white male she might be demonizing (at her worst).

But I have to say that after laboring through the book,  I found it scintillating and unique.  She takes on sociology and history and psychology as her own tropes and twists them masterfully in short order.  I was moved and radicalized in a strange way.  Quite beautiful and quite unique.

Although I do wish she stop writing prose.  But what do I know?

Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present.  Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please. (p. 49)

Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition. (p. 55)

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (read by John Malkovich)

Only have way through listening to this performance of Breakfast of Champions by John Malkovich.  As a young person, I thoroughly enjoyed the novel.  Later in life, I fell in love with the acting power and prowess of John Malkovich.  Perfect match, so far.  Malkovich's chewy, grumbling voice is allowing me to hear the book with new ears, after trying to re-read it several years ago and finding it bland and vacuous.

video snippet of Malkovich reading

The Whites by Richard Price

The Incarnations by Susan Barker

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth

To write [the necessary qualities are]: massive self-approval, a thick skin and the conviction of the importance of 'some urgent conception of the universe and the state o fman', which, though inevitably 'arrant toash', is necessary to give the writer the stubborn impetus to continue. (summary and quotes from 'Round the Point,' unpublished Larkin dialectical playlet)


I enjoyed this book but that is probably because I love all things Larkin.  Booth's analysis of the poems are long-winded and sometimes unnecessary, and he is much too fond of the adjective "less-deceived," also the title of one of Larkin's pivotal books.

I liked learning that the original draft ending to "High Windows" instead of reading "and is endless" read "and fucking piss."

Larkin and Monica Jones defaced a first-edition copy of Iris Murdoch's 1956 novel, The Flight from the Enchanter, and Booth criticize's their many hours of "sterile boredom" that must have led them to do this, 1300 alterations in all.  Well, I think it's funny.






Next, Please

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,

Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!

Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,

Flagged, and the figurehead wit golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake

No waters breed or break.

Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles

Very moving first novel by the author of Want Not Want Not, a superlative second novel.  Recommended.

City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg.

Pretty marvelous book.  Less marvelously too long, though.  Still, couldn't (literally) put it down.

But I finished it with equal parts exhaustion and sadness at seeing the story end.

It was so long that whole sections swam out of the key-frame of my attention, and when characters and incidents and meaningful "things" seem to ring a bell, I was too tired to go back and tried to find them and fit them back on the puzzle.

It's a tremendous meaty accomplishment of a place -- New York City -- and a time -- 1975-1977 -- that will endure.  Hallberg's descriptive power, his endless playful grasp of lingo, jingo and jive astonished me page after page.  But, too, they seem to impress the author to the point where he grew lazy in editing himself -- more is not always better in prose.

The rich family at the center of the narrative -- the Hamilton-Sweeneys -- were not nearly as interesting to me as the outliers -- Charlie "The Prophet," Samantha, Richard G., and the detective.

Despite the (almost awkward) inclusion of Mercer, as an important black character, the novel does seem to suffer from the great stifling condition of privileged-neurotic-white-folks-who-sound-the-same-when-they-think.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke

Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald

A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolano

Molloy by Samuel Beckett

There I am then back in the saddle, in my numbed heart a prick of misgiving, like one dying of cancer obliged to consult a dentist.

All roads were right for me, a wrong road was an event, for me.

For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking othing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further one.

But these were mere crises, and what are crises compared to all that never stops, knows neither ebb nor flow, its surface leaden above infernal depths.

We underestimate this little hole, it seems to me, we call it the arsehol and affect to despise it.  But is it not rather the true portal of of our being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen-door.  Nothing goes in, or so little, that is not rejected on the spot, or very nearly. Almost everything revolts it that comes from without and what comes from within does not seem to receive a very warm welcome either.  Are these not significant facts.  Time will tell.

It's a strange thing.  I don't like men, and I don't like animals.  As for God, he is beginning to disgust me.

Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.

Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.

Intense and intensely beautiful and sad, and hugely blackly comic.  Parallels to my beloved THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O'Brien abound.  For investigation.

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Circle by Dave Eggers

Sort of cool imagining of near-future when a Google-like company has seized control of almost the complete world.  There is forward momentum throughout and its an easy read.

Many flaws though.  Awful dialogue that sounds mostly like editorials, thin characterizations (particularly of the narrator, Mae), gigantically obvious and silly metaphors (the Aquarium replicating the bottom of the Mariana Trench).

I was increasingly reminded of Dosteovsky's Underground Man who seems embodied by the hapless, martyred Mercer who wants only to be left alone to construct his chandeliers out of antlers.  Following on that, then, Mae is the proto-typcial Above-Ground Woman, who seeks to be completely known to society, completely "Transparent."

At Freddie's by Penelope Fitzgerald

Perhaps not as unsettling and certainly not as personal as Offshore, At Freddie's is still a wry, actuely observed triumph about the 1960s theatre world in Britain, children, love and a host of other things.

Straight White Male by John Niven

Sheer enjoyment.  Some one-dimensional characters, but the portrayal of the protagonist, an alcoholic sex maniac screenwriter and one-time novelist, as he spirals out of control and attempts a mid-life course correction is dynamite:  funny, touching, verbose, and maudlin.  But always funny.

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee

Hefty biography of the beloved Penelope Fitzgerald, whose eight compact novels she served up late in her life stand as the epitome of a certain preferred (by me) brand of 20th century British fiction.  The novels are pungent, concise, brilliant narratives that illustrate by ommission, irony and silence.

I'm thankful Lee spends so much time on each novel, sending me back to re-read each one with her inflated examination of the plots and characters, settings and sources.

If anything, Lee might inflate them too much-- she might take something away from the strength of the novels of themselves by explaining their silences.  But Lee is at least aware of this double-edged sword.