evelyn_b

What I Finished Reading A While Ago And Then Forgot To Post About

I loved The Corrections with all my heart for maybe 500 pages straight and then very suddenly at the end I didn't love it anymore. It's not that it "pulled a Zadie" (as my brother calls it when a book climbs a dizzying ladder of plot threads and then vanishes in midair), but it went sour and brittle for me all at once. Not because of the fathomlessly miserable ending; the misery is great. I think it's because Franzen persistently has it in for Enid in a way that activated all my reactionary sympathies, and then tried to end the book with a stilleto thrust into the dark heart of Enid Being Godawful instead of complicating the picture like he knows he's capable of. I know that in real life, sometimes there really is nothing to say but "Wow, what a bitch." But I expect more from fiction.

Do I recommend The Corrections anyway? I absolutely do. Franzen's international satire is a lot weaker than his quotidian Midwestern angst, and his walk-on characters aren't always distinguishable from Candyland cutouts, but when he's good he's very, very good.

I was surprised to find an entire sequence based on the difficulty of finding a working pay phone in Manhattan in 2001. This must be a regional thing, or possibly an NYC thing - I can't recall ever having trouble finding a pay phone until at least 2005. Or maybe I was just lucky?

What I Finished More Recently

I've been trying to get up earlier lately, and almost always succeeding, though it has not led to new heights of productivity (whatever that would entail). Yesterday, for example, I was awake, dressed, and carrying a cup of delicious coffee by 6AM, three hours before it makes sense for me to clock in, and all I did with the extra time was read Weike Wang's novel Chemistry in its entirety. So Chemistry must have been good, right? I've been thinking about it ever since, so I'm going to say yes.

( MSS Fall 1984 )

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her is fine. I was fascinated to learn that Nancy was created by the same Stratemeyer Syndicate that gave the world not only the Hardy Boys, but the Bobbsey Twins, the excreable Rover Boys, the Motor Girls, Dorothy Dale, and literally dozens more resolutely formulaic series books. The ins and outs of producing a series, dealing with rogue authors, rewriting old books to better suit contemporary mores and then having to do it all over again because time keeps passing, and so on are interesting but not necessarily fascinating. There's some enjoyable material on the world of early land-grant coeducation and the perils of trying to bring popular series books to the screen. The description of the 1938 movie adaptation, where Nancy is played by a sassy 15-year-old who spouts statistics about the average mental age of women and makes a lot of cutesy faces, was a high point for me. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had liked Nancy Drew growing up? It tended to assume that anyone reading the book was a Nancy fan and that non-fans were all humorless librarians or male chauvinists, and didn't really take the opportunity to help me appreciate Nancy more.

Anyway, if you want to learn all about the Stratemeyer Syndicate, this guy has created a website about it.


What I'm Reading Now

I was so excited about Sindya Bhanoo's book Seeking Fortune Elsewhere that I accidentally ordered it twice. I placed an order at the bookstore the day it came out, and the next day got the copy I'd pre-ordered from the publisher back in 2021. It's a small collection of nearly perfect short stories.

Of A Fire On the Moon, Norman Mailer's book-length journalistic inquiry into the space program, is a good candidate for Most Norman Mailer Thing Ever Written By Norman Mailer. But isn't that everything by Norman Mailer, you ask? Yes, but only Of A Fire On the Moon begins with Mailer in the dumps because Hemingway shot himself and no one called Mailer for a comment. Then he clarifies, in case you were worried, that he did eventually get asked to comment, just not right away! Then he decides to name himself Aquarius for the duration of this essay, because he was born under the sign of Aquarius and there's this song about the Age of Aquarius, and Aquarius is in space, so it's relevant. And then we're off to the space races! Like all the best Mailer, this one veers drunkenly from insight to ass-pinching and from prescience to petrification, usually within the same paragraph. This is probably a bug for someone, but it's a feature for me. It's hard to write about the present, especially when you're trying to look knowing and world-weary at the same time.

Do You Have Enough Book-Related Challenges in Your Life?

22 in '22 is a "visit more bookstores" challenge - the idea is to visit 22 bookstores in the year 2022. If your region is low on bookstores you can even visit the same one 22 times, as long as you go on different days. Sounds fun!

What I've Finished Reading

Last week I forgot to mention An Error of Judgment by Pamela Hansford Johnson, the last 99 Novels selection for 1962. Johnson is, as the About the Author on the back page informs me, the wife of my perfectly acceptable non-nemesis, C.P. Snow - and An Error of Judgment is constructed a lot like one of Snow's lawyer-memoirs: doggedly sensible literate narrator, loosely interwoven personal and professional concerns with a fateful choice at the center, plenty of earnest conversations and monologues. But it's significantly weirder, a little more lively, and a lot more memorable than anything in the Snowverse. I don't know if ultimately the plot "works" - there's something a little artificial about the way the doctor manuvers himself into the set-piece of his crime - but it was certainly a ride and I was glad to take it.

Just A Normal Marriage is the Harlequin novel by Leigh Michaels that I got out of the free books box down the street. I enjoyed 90% of it even though the business of getting Shauna and Rob into a marriage of convenience was pretty strained. The plot: her narcissistic socialite mother is happy to give wealthy Shauna custody of her young half-sister, but only if Shauna is married! Rob is a friendly pediatrician who is concerned about the half-sister's future. Shauna offers to pay his student loans - if he marries her for a year! I also didn't see the point of making Shauna a twenty-six-year-old virgin, or of half the misunderstandings, and Rob's reaction when he thinks Shauna has fallen into the arms of her toolish ex-fiance (when it's actually attempted rape! Rob, what good are you if you can't just ask what happened?) is unworthy of an otherwise good dude. But all of that is no harm done (and thisbluespirit, I will be sure to add the summary to Unconventional Courtship so it can be livened up with Dalek Sec and others).

There is also Faust, technically a play, by my best new genius friend J.W. Goethe. Faust is nuts. It's magnificently nuts. It starts with a heartbreaking prologue about finishing a book at eighty that you started in youth (which is what happened with Faust) and rolls right into a hilarious second prologue that is a lively discussion among a director, a clown, and an actor about what should go into a play. Then it's time for a board meeting in heaven between God and the Devil about whether the devil can go ahead and try tempting that one guy (God says go ahead because otherwise there wouldn't be a story). Then there's an Easter party in the streets of Universitytowne and the Devil sneaks into Faust's house in the shape of a poodle, and it's all downhill, and uphill, and downhill and back up again from there. The translator's note keeps comparing it to Ulysses, so I spent the whole thing thinking about how apt a comparison that is: it's an obsessively sprawling, wry, wacky, incorrigible human circus. Unlike Ulysses, it is almost entirely written in rhyme.

(It's "technically" a play because it's written as one, but I am skeptical about its stageability, though I guess stranger things have happened).

Before I read Faust, the only thing I knew about Faust (Goethe version) was that in the end, Mephisto loses track of Faust's soul because he's too busy lusting after a pack of boyish angels to drag it to hell properly. I am happy to report that I was not misled, and this is in fact what happens.

What I'm Reading Now

Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer - which hasn't aged that well and most of whose component pieces aren't that great (Mailer keeps saying things like "As you can see if you're not an idiot, this essay I wrote/freshman creative writing story/dumb joke for a friend is pure garbage and you're a sucker if you thought it was any good, but it would be criminally dishonest of me not to include it in this Advertisement for Myself since I did write it after all" and then you read it and wish you were reading a less genre-breaking iconoclastic hammerpiece where selection is made on more traditional grounds) but which I still kind of like because I can't help liking Mailer. There's this one piece that's just Mailer handing out bitchy backhanded compliments to every author of roughly his own age whom anyone ever compared him to, and my heart just goes out to him - just flaps clumsily out to him like a scruffy maternal goose. And this going-out of my heart, with attendant feeling that Mailer and I are brittle, self-protecting sisters under the skin, is its own back-handed compliment, all the sadder for being directed sixty years after the fact at someone who will never read it. Clearly one of us is rubber, and one of us is glue.

Also, Frankensten! It's great. Victor Frankenstein is an idiot. It's also much more of a Romantic travelogue than I expected. More on this next week.

( Kristin Lavransdatter )

What I Plan to Read Next

One night when I was drunkenly describing the plot of Faust to some guys, one of them said that Thomas Mann, author of The Magic Mountain, had also written a Faust. So maybe I'll read that? There are also a couple of 99 Novels from the library, The Spire by William Golding and Late Call by Angus Wilson.

Where, though? It's a good question.

What I've Finished Reading

About three-fourths of the way through A Double Life, a wonderful thing happens. With a completely straight face, the author J. Michael Lennon appears at a party, in the third person, as "J. Michael Lennon, a young professor at the University of Illinois." Maybe it's not that wonderful, but I laughed and laughed. This shout-out to Mailer's "third-person personal" is all the funnier for being apparently egoless. Lennon appears a few times throughout the rest of the book, with no attention called to the fact that he is The Author of the Book You Hold In Your Hands, Dear Reader.

I enjoyed it a lot, though my fondness for Mailer is pretty abstract. Eventually I'll read his novels about Jesus and Hitler, though probably not Harlot's Ghost (the 1,100-page CIA novel that ends with the words TO BE CONTINUED). I followed with detached amusement his not-very-deft attempts to feud with Michiko Kakutani and be a Hollywood Intellectual. I didn't find his claims to totally genuinely 100% love all women as convincing as Balzac's. There is one really sad and nerve-wracking story in here, and that's the year Mailer tries to engineer a writing and party-going career for his paroled prison correspondent, Jack Abbot.

Mailer on Mailer in The Spooky Art:

Writers aren't taken seriously anymore, and a large part of the blame must go to the writers of my generation, most certainly including myself. We haven't written the books that should have been written. We've spent too much time exploring ourselves. We haven't done the imaginative work that could have helped define America, and as a result, our average citizen does not grow in self-understanding. We just expand all over the place, and this spread is about as attractive as collapsed and flabby dough on a stainless steel table.

You can always count on Mailer to give too much credit to himself even when he's trying to be self-critical.

What I'm Reading Now

If I'd picked up To Shape the Dark at a bookstore or library instead of ordering it, I might have balked at its multiple fancy fonts and slightly irritating introduction and put it straight back on the shelf. I would have missed out - not necessarily on a masterpiece, but on a thoroughly enjoyable anthology of sci-fi short stories about scientists. Editor Athena Andreadis congratulates her authors on having avoided the "as you know, Bob" style of writing, but they mostly haven't at all. I'm surprised at how soothing I find these fresh buckets of exposition being dumped over me one after another.

Favorite story so far: "Fieldwork" by Shariann Lewitt, about a geologist whose grandmother died trying to colonize Europa. That's the other, more obviously soothing thing about sci-fi: the illusion of a future. It's terribly cozy to think anyone could have a grandmother who colonized Europa.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Woman in the Water, a Most Comfortable Man in London prequel about A Deadly Serial Killer, arrived yesterday. I've been sort of sighing resignedly in its direction.