I've termed GHOSTS a novel, but that's because it is a stand-alone book. At 96 pages, it is really a novella. When I review THE NEW YORK TRILOGY, of wI've termed GHOSTS a novel, but that's because it is a stand-alone book. At 96 pages, it is really a novella. When I review THE NEW YORK TRILOGY, of which "Ghosts" is the middle story, I will call it a novella. In any case, it's much more of a sustained narrative than the first part, "City Of Glass," and I think, then, that page numbers alone don't make this a novella and "City Of Glass" a novel. They are stylistically different. "Ghosts" is definitely a novella in the Jamesian sense. It could be recited from a stage with a short intermission and it would be singularly powerful. It is the story of a hired snoop being snooped on and, while filled with Auster's patented literary Escherisms, it also has the sense of forboding which makes Auster's world the sphere of the damned. Just as "City Of Glass" referred to Cervantes, "Ghosts" puts Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne and Melville in the caravan careening around a New York of the lost....more
This short novel is the first of the installments in Paul Auster's THE NEW YORK TRILOGY. This installment first appeared in 1985. I'll refer you to GoThis short novel is the first of the installments in Paul Auster's THE NEW YORK TRILOGY. This installment first appeared in 1985. I'll refer you to Goodreads' thumbnail description if you'd like to get a sense of the premise. My view is CITY OF GLASS is Noir. It bears comparison to the works of Kafka, Nathanael West, Knut Hamsun and Dashiell Hammett. The prose is very formal. Auster's peers died around the time he was born. A reader of this book must be patient because it is an exploration of what it is to be an outsider. Which reminds me: Camus. It is set in a part of New York weirdly familiar to me. I spent from birth to five in the same neighborhood. Some have said this doesn't strike them as a book really starring New York. I say it does star New York. I imprinted there. ...more
THE NEW YORK TRILOGY contains three short works by Paul Auster: "City Of Glass" (written from 1981 to 1982), "Ghosts" (written in 1983), and "The LockTHE NEW YORK TRILOGY contains three short works by Paul Auster: "City Of Glass" (written from 1981 to 1982), "Ghosts" (written in 1983), and "The Locked Room" (written in 1984.) "City Of Glass" was published as a standalone book in 1985, and "Ghosts" and "The Locked Room" were published, each by itself, in 1986. Then Penguin started publishing them in 1987. They were finally published in one volume in 1990. The edition I have, with an introduction by Luc Sante, came out in 2006. I don't know when Penguin put Art Spiegelman's wonderful cover art on it, but the flap - Yes! This paperback has flaps! - mentions Paul Auster's novel 4321, which came out in 2017, so it's obvious the TRILOGY has had at least two covers. This book was given to me by friends a month ago. I have always been meaning to read something by Paul Auster. This edition of this book is the best place to start. I did cheat: I went to my library and borrowed a memoir by Paul Auster called THE RED NOTEBOOK. It gave me a good notion of the history of THE NEW YORK TRILOGY's publication. Auster had to shop "City Of Glass" around for some time. Note the three-year lapse between the completion of the book and the publication date. Then note the steamroller effect. His independent publisher, Sun & Moon, published all three books by 1986. Penguin, as major as a publisher gets, puts all three out between 1987 and 1988 and then puts them in one volume in 1990. The copyright page of my copy says it has been reprinted thirty times. (To be specific, it has a line which reads "27 29 30 28." If I've interpreted those numbers wrong, I will still say that Paul Auster is a writer as such. I've known what he looks like since the eighties. I've read articles he's written. I've seen him on PBS; heard him on NPR and have generally sensed he is a highly respected author.) But not until now, at the age of sixty-one, have I ever read a single book of his. Strictly in terms of tone, THE NEW YORK TRILOGY is sturdy. Auster's cadence is more mid-century than present day. Even for someone writing in the early to mid-eighties, he has an unusually direct way with a sentence. If I'd had to guess, I'd have said this book was put together no later than 1958. I think the events in it go no later than 1977 or so, but I don't think it even mentions world events. There is nothing in here, except the mention of what year it is, every now and then, to indicate a world where Vietnam, Woodstock or Watergate have occurred. It seems mid-century because its surface resemblance is to Noir stories, which were so popular before 1960 and which rarely made reference to world events. The writers THE NEW YORK TRILOGY specifically refers to tend to be the major American writers of the nineteenth century, with Mark Twain left out. Hemingway once said American literature begins with Mark Twain. Auster refers to Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville and Emerson, all dead a good sixty years before Auster's stylistic models wrote. He writes like Nathanael West, Camus and Dashiell Hammett. The question running through my mind as I read was whether or not the various doppelgängers haunting each other reflected a pattern. The answer, I think, is "No." Although there is at least one stunt (involving street directions which spell a phrase) and a few literary references which reward those in the know (one example being the moment a character says to another character, "Call me Redburn") the plot never requires the reader to notice these things. The fact that the walk one character takes actually spells a word is not underscored by Auster. I suspected a word or shape was being indicated by turns the character made, but I never felt Auster demanded I puzzle it out. I only learned it was, indeed, a spelling, when I read a review which gave away what was spelled.) I got the reference when a character said "Call me Redburn" because I've read all of Herman Melville. Melville wrote a book called REDBURN and the first line of his epic novel MOBY-DICK is "Call me Ishmael." Just before the character says "Call me Redburn" there is a passage about a sailor walking along a deck in a snowstorm. The passage itself reminded me of a passage in one of Melville's novels. THEN, Auster's character says "Call me Redburn." There is no plot point dependent on this. A reader who knows nothing of Melville can read this part and simply think it's part of the story. The reader may wonder who Redburn is, but, since people in this book take up pseudonyms, the larger point, that the world is made of people hiding behind various identities, is made. Auster's specific references are not meant as obstacles to the telling of these three loosely connected stories. The larger theme is one of people deliberately isolating themselves and being perceived by others who, themselves, would rather not be seen. The three stories have some interconnected characters, but Auster is not testing the reader. He himself crops up here and there, but he doesn't break the fourth wall. The fact that one character from one story turns up in the other does not mean that we're supposed to solve something. I ventire to say that these books were not intended to form a trilogy. It happened that Paul Auster put a few characters from each book into the other books, but only toward the end of the third book does the narrator hint that there is a commonality between the books. Kurt Vonnegut used to put characters from his novels into his other novels, but he usually did it with satirical fanfare. While there is a larger reason for Auster to cause a character from one book to appear in another, they appear offstage. It is an unusually subdued funhouse running through these books. The characters are haunted by sins of omission. Briefly, "City Of Glass" describes someone undergoing a process of dissipation, "Ghosts" shows two people inspire paranoia in each other, and "The Locked Room" is about a person who so identifies with someone else that when he gains what he thought the other person would get, he becomes very distracted. Drink lots of coffee....more
This is the first Paul Auster book I've read. I've been aware of him for decades. Certainly, I've read a review or two he's written and I've seen him This is the first Paul Auster book I've read. I've been aware of him for decades. Certainly, I've read a review or two he's written and I've seen him on panel discussions on TV. I have always MEANT to read him. About two weeks ago, friends gave me a copy of THE NEW YORK TRILOGY, in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with a cover by Art Spiegelman. That is a handsome book. On my way home from work tonight I stopped at the library, as I often do, oasis that it is, and I thought that, since the book I'd been given was at home, I'd spend an hour or so reading the copy I expected the library to have. As luck would have it, someone had checked it out. I didn't want to read other fiction by Auster, because THE NEW YORK TRILOGY was going to be my first exposure to his fiction. I wanted to go right to it without cheating. But it occurred to me that, surely Paul Auster has put out some nonfiction. I looked up the library's collection and found the book I'm reviewing now, which I read in the space of fifty minutes or so. It is short, to the point, and its chief merit is the grace of its uncomplicated prose. The them of the connected essays is coincidence. I do not get the sense that Paul Auster is superstitious, but the beauty of the coincidences he describes is undeniable. It is not celebratory, but it highlights the feeling one gets when the first thing one thinks of at certain junctures is coincidence. A lucky coin which CAN'T be the same coin turns up at a lucky moment, for example. There is one tragic event in this book. Auster neither dwells on it nor brushes it off. It feeds the larger coincidence of his life, luck playing an ambiguous hand. It helped make him what a writer needs to be: An observer. There are a few other examples of ill luck, which while awful for the people he talks about, probably were not tragic. The one tragedy in the book, described in spare, clear sentences, is the central moment of the story. I did notice one glaring typo about three-quarters through, where a word ended in "ing" when it shouldn't have. Other than that, though, this is an attractive volume, as most New Directions books are. I believe it is designed to be read in one sitting. I didn't even have to check it out. This bodes well for when I read my next book, the gift from my friends, THE NEW YORK TRILOGY. ...more
This review contains general SPOILERS. On the surface, this book is about a corrupt businessman who leaves Mumbai to settle in New York City when thingThis review contains general SPOILERS. On the surface, this book is about a corrupt businessman who leaves Mumbai to settle in New York City when things get too hot for him. Just under the surface, THE GOLDEN HOUSE is a knowing look at New York. Under that surface it is a comment on film studies. The main theme, of course, is Salman Rushdie's career theme: Moral ambiguity. I think the ideal reader of a Salman Rushdie book is a somewhat savvy person who loves books, movies and music, who has a humanistic outlook and who actually has been to the grave of P.G. Wodehouse. A character in this book wants to visit it. I actually HAVE visited it. Thank you, Salman Rushdie. You somehow know me! As with Saul Bellow, John Updike and Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie makes humorous observations throughout. You are in a comfortably appointed reading room at a university, near a fireplace. Rushdie's telling you stories. As wild as the stories are, there is great comfort in a sense he gives you of personal engagement. I'm not sure Creative Writing, as it has been taught since the Idaho Writers Conference became a force in the 1950s, emphasizes enough the merit of fiction woven with one-liners. Salman Rushdie has pacing, a sense of drama, a penchant to refer to many movies, books, historical figures (living or dead) and he shows, quite often, the sensibility of a thriller writer. But he has a comic side, which, again, is an attribute the Creative Writing mind of the last seventy years suppresses. I'll mention Bellow again. Bellow is sort of the un-Flannery. Rushdie is in his company. Stick to this book. It is dramatic, yes, and has an element or two of the thriller. But it is not, as a friend of mine put it about another book, propulsive. Rushdie doesn't pull you along, but he takes you to higher ground. Climb.
- This review contains a general spoiler -There are echoes of Ralph Ellison, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner in Brandon Taylor's novel, REAL - This review contains a general spoiler -There are echoes of Ralph Ellison, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner in Brandon Taylor's novel, REAL LIFE. Its thematic and stylistic similarities with Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN are manifest. Taylor captures Ellison's sardonic tone throughout this story of a young black graduate student whose social set is almost exclusively white. The point of view of a man perpetually on the fringe of a deeply unhappy, privileged elite is very much like that of Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway in THE GREAT GATSBY. The parts of REAL LIFE dealing with a traumatic childhood in the rural south have something of Faulkner's wildness. At the same time, REAL LIFE has crystallized the post-Violet Quill gay novel. It is not about the closet. The characters don't spend any energy on worrying if people will notice they are gay. But they spend every second of their lives wondering if the people around them are going to misinterpret them. The main character, Wallace, has resigned himself to the condescension with which white people treat him. Much of the power of this novel comes from the sheer accuracy of its descriptions of white people being evasive whenever their racism seems to have been noticed by Wallace. But Wallace, a survivor of sexual abuse, is forever guarded in his interactions. Systemic racism and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder inform Wallace's moves. There are wistful moments in this book, humorous situations and several realistic glimpses of the anxiety of academic life. It's good writing....more
I read this book starting last August (in 2021) and finished it in about three weeks. I'm pleased to say I did this. When it came out in 1988, I read I read this book starting last August (in 2021) and finished it in about three weeks. I'm pleased to say I did this. When it came out in 1988, I read about ten pages and decided I'd continue at some point. It's been thirty-three years, but I finally caught up to my brother, who, indeed, did read the whole thing in 1988. I won't summarize the book. Goodreads' thumbnail description, which, I find, duplicates the text of the folding flap of the first US printing, is as succinct a description as you can find. (I suspect Rushdie wrote it, because the phrase "self-made self", a pretty humorous phrase, is in it.) In any case, I will make a few observations: This is a very entertaining book, but you must pay close attention. It rewards close reading. Salman Rushdie is a solid storyteller. If you are bamboozled by juxtapositions of time, place and point of view, stick with it and you'll find parallels throughout the telling. It is, above all, a truthful representation of human behavior. A lot of THE SATANIC VERSES is reminiscent of Saul Bellow, in particular the sections dealing with Alleluia Cone and her parents. She even drives a Citroen, which is a car which figures prominently in Bellow's HUMBOLDT'S GIFT. Bellow's way of summarizing, in a paragraph, an entire life and the lives that life intersects, is frequently reflected in THE SATANIC VERSES. A lot of writers from the mid-to-late 20th century have a similar tone, but Rushdie absolutely replicates Bellow's syntax, especially in the characterizations of three or four grifters who pop up every so often in this book. This is all to the good. Do read this novel....more
JUST TO LET YOU KNOW: This review may contain spoilers. I also will point out that the facsimile edition shown in the thumbnail above is highly likely JUST TO LET YOU KNOW: This review may contain spoilers. I also will point out that the facsimile edition shown in the thumbnail above is highly likely to be textually inferior to the edition published in the Library of America's HENRY JAMES, NOVELS, 1886-90. I reviewed the Library of America edition last night, but I thought I'd post a review under the facsimile edition's listing because I think many readers, keying in the title THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA, will be frustrated by the fact that Goodreads' first listing leads them to a collection instead of a stand-alone edition. In any case, my review refers to the text in the Library of America edition, which many public libraries have. THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA is interesting in that it shows Henry James trying hard to tell the sort of story he never tells. Throughout his career, James wrote about the upper class, or, more to the point, the ruling class. In this novel, he writes about the lower middle class, or, more to the point, the angry lower class. While he understands the class system, he seems to be afraid that his reader won't, so he makes his main character, a budding socialist, the illegitimate son of a lord. That in itself is not unusual in 19th-century literature, but James is trying to imitate Dickens in this instance. James himself lacks Dickens's innate sense of outrage. He cannot replicate Dickens's style. James's other model here is Dostoevsky, whose general sense of hopelessness is not natural to James. James, ever the observer of the aristocracy, is most comfortable when he describes the Princess, whose main desire is to humiliate her husband by espousing the cause of socialism. She is well-observed by James, as are almost all the other aristocrats in this novel. Even the socialists (or anarchists; James making no distinction) are believable when talking to each other. But the main character, Hyacinth Robinson, the boring radical, neutralizes every element of excitement in every scene he's in. No doubt James realized his novel's flaw, but he was once of the most accomplished writers who ever lived, and my interest lay in seeing him stick to his thankless task. ...more
POSSIBLE SPOILERS. Disclaimer: Because this Library Of America volume, which contains three novels, is the one which contains the most definitive text POSSIBLE SPOILERS. Disclaimer: Because this Library Of America volume, which contains three novels, is the one which contains the most definitive text of THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA available, I stress that it is the only one of the three in this volume I've read. Goodreads reviews can only be posted if the reviewer has clicked "I'm finished." So, while I have finished THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA, I have not read THE REVERBERATOR or THE TRAGIC MUSE. THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA was published in 1886, relatively early in Henry James's career. He was forty-three years old, had been a published novelist for almost fifteen years and had already written an unquestioned masterpiece, A PORTRAIT OF A LADY. He died in 1916, well established as a writer of high merit. THE TURN OF THE SCREW, written in 1898, is easily the archetypal novella. James is an iconic author with a wide readership more than a century after his death. But this book is James's attempt to get out of himself. He commandeers Dickens's properties while venturing into Dostoevsky's territory. Whenever his main character, Hyacinth Robinson, is the focus, James must suppress his obvious desire to satirize the underground. He anticipates Conrad when he characterizes the players in the secret society Hyacinth is lured into. The Princess with whom he is enraptured is plausible, but Hyacinth's sexless love for her is not. The deadbeats who argue at the secret political meetings Hyacinth attends are plausible, but their trust in hyacinth is not. I think James had every element he needed in order to make this book soar, but he undercut his effort in order to pay tribute to Dickens. We learn at the start that Hyacinth, a working-class youth living with the impoverished seamstress who adopts him at birth, is actually the son of a lord. That isn't necessarily Dickensian, but his funny name is. James, however, doesn't know how to devise a funny name, let alone one which would convey something about the character it is given to. The name Hyacinth Robinson conjures up no images, the way such names as Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge or Uncle Pumblechook do. There is another character in this book who is an impossibly good person. She has a mysterious malady from birth which is never specified. James finally lets loose with what is definitely his own thought about her when two characters both say to each other, "I've never liked her." But, as I've said, James is paying tribute to Dickens and not parodying him. For 99 per cent of the book, Hyacinth is Henry James's sincere effort at giving the reader a Dickens hero. But he is also trying to show how the underground works. When Paul Muniment, Hyacinth's idol (and the brother of the over-angelic invalid Hyacinth secretly despises) talks about the rigged game of society, James actually shows he knows how revolutionists talk. But Hyacinth has to be made to be Muniment's rival for the affections of the Princess, and James's unwillingness to specify a sexual dynamic undercuts the portrayal of Muniment. (Note the use of a funny name here, too. It's weird but not weird in an intriguing way. James can't master Dickens's naming trick.) ONLY Dickens can make us root for a fundamentally bland figure. David Copperfield has no human characteristics that I can remember (except for his secretly wishing his first wife would go ahead and die, which Dickens, as an author, clearly wants her to do, do-gooding martyr that she is) and Henry James can only make such a character unfathomably dull. Dickens appeals to a reader's sense of foul play. We like David Copperfield because he has been dealt a bad hand. There is no other reason to care about him. But it is, after all, THE reason to care about him. Add to this that James has a conflict: He wishes to imply an entire world of underground activity. His character Paul Muniment even says that world exists, everywhere, unnoticed, so it's clear that James is aware of this way of thinking. But James's odd super-patriotism comes to the fore, preventing James from detailing the seediness he knows is a dominant quality in the lives of anarchists. Hence, Hyacinth periodically makes proclamations about British backbone. Again, James ALMOST gets somewhere in his depiction of a working-class woman who sometimes socializes with Hyacinth. She is a realistic version of Eliza Dolittle. But James wants us to care about Hyacinth's relationship with the Princess, an aristocrat. I have not stressed that most of this book is written with great care. But it is the great care of a master craftsman who has forgotten the shape of the object he's creating. THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA has everything a book needs. But Henry James attached a donkey's tale to it. He learned from his mistake and wrote several uncompromising masterpieces after this. If you read this novel, you'll watch a great writer fall on his ass for five-hundred and fifty-six pages. ...more
I consider this a memoir, although several reviews have termed it a collection of essays. While essays are worked into it (transcribed from Ellis's poI consider this a memoir, although several reviews have termed it a collection of essays. While essays are worked into it (transcribed from Ellis's podcast), this is a narrative leading from Ellis's childhood, through his rise as a novelist, through his moment as literary pariah to today, when he is an iconic Hollywood insider. (WHITE was published in April, 2019. I'm writing this Goodreads review on July 18th, 2021.) I think one ought to compare this to a book by Thomas Mann, published just before the end of the First World War. The title (translated into English) is REFLECTIONS OF A NONPOLITICAL MAN. Let me be the first to say I have not read REFLECTIONS OF A NONPOLITICAL MAN. Let me be the first to guess Bret Easton Ellis hasn't either. Let me also guess that Ellis has a pretty good idea of Mann's skill as a novelist. I think Mann is a very congenial novelist. He's funny, he's deep, he is urbane. His political nonfiction, REFLECTIONS OF A NONPOLITICAL MAN, has, over the last hundred years, almost invariably been described as naïve. The German nationalism he fell into as he wrote REFLECTIONS fell out from under him just over a decade later, as the Nazis took over. By the late 1930s, Mann was in Pacific Palisades, writing DOCTOR FAUSTUS, in which the narrator, a German living under the Third Reich, declares that everything German is now "intolerable to the world." Ellis says, several times in his memoir, that AMERICAN PSYCHO gives us a foretaste of Trump. That Ellis spends much of the rest of his memoir saying that people should not panic about Trump shows me that Ellis, highly skilled, perceptive novelist, is as blind as Thomas Mann was when he wrote REFLECTIONS OF A NONPOLITICAL MAN. A huge merit of WHITE is its openness. Ellis could be sitting across a kitchen table with you, telling you things about himself you would not want to tell anyone about yourself. He seems to be smiling at you as you read. I get a full sense of a man here. Very few American authors convey this personal quality. There are things I wish he'd change his mind about. For example, I think he should look more carefully at the suicide of Tyler Clementi, the eighteen year old Rutgers student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate promised the world, through the internet, that he'd air footage of a sexual encounter Clementi had and which the roommate had caught, surreptitiously, on his webcam. Ellis calls this a prank. He calls people who wanted the roommate prosecuted "wusses." There is a point at which the calm and collected are simply indifferent. This book was written three years before the Capitol riot (aka January 6th.) Mann had about fifteen years to reflect before he realized REFLECTIONS OF A NONPOLITICAL MAN was part of what led to Hitler. Nowadays the world is lit by lightning, as Tennessee Williams said. And, God knows, Twitter is faster than all of us....more
Eric Cervini has written a solid biography of a significant figure, and in doing so he gives us a very good picture of the movement this figure headedEric Cervini has written a solid biography of a significant figure, and in doing so he gives us a very good picture of the movement this figure headed up. The man was Frank Kameny, who fought in the Second World War (and killed in it) and whose promising career as an astronomer was derailed in an act of entrapment in 1957. The Vice Squad sent a guy to touch the John Thomas of any given man at a train station urinal and Kameny didn't stop the Vice's fingers from making contact. The inevitable arrest occurred on the instant, but something unforeseen also occurred: Kameny, took his case to court. He kept appealing the decision whenever he lost, going higher and higher over the ensuing decades, in his effort to regain the security clearance the United States government had taken away from him. In the meantime, he headed the Mattachine Society's Washington group. The Mattachine Society was an advocacy group for homosexual men. It was run almost entirely by homosexual men, although lesbians, on and off, worked with them. Straight people, too, were encouraged to help, and a handful did. Kameny courted the American Civil Liberties Union. I'm not giving this book a very deep description. It has, as its chief merit, a reportorial tone. Much of this book is news. Gay activism before Stonewall is a little-known piece of history. Cervini had access to thousands of pages of Frank Kameny's correspondence, which friends convinced him to donate to a University five years before his death in 2011. Cervini hold the reader's interest not merely by writing well but by quoting court transcripts, newspaper articles, interviews and letters in such a way as to convey a sense of immediacy. This is rare in the first place and almost unheard of in a book requiring deep research. I am sixty-one years old. Most of the events in book occurred when I was quite young. But in the last fifth or so, the name Jack Baker came up. I distinctly remember seeing, in one of the major news magazines (NEWSWEEK, I think, or maybe NEW YORK) a photo of a campaign poster put out by someone running for class president at a University. I will never forget the name Jack Baker, or the amused shock I felt at the age of twelve seeing the poster in the article. Cervini captures Jack Baker's effect quite well: "Baker had run as a blatantly gay candidate. In his posters, Baker sat on the ground, staring contemplatively at the camera, wearing perfectly groomed hair, a button-down shirt, jeans, and - closest to the viewer - high-heeled shoes. 'PUT YOURSELF IN JACK BAKER'S SHOES!' it proclaimed." As a kid, I remember thinking this man was funny and brave. It is my first memory of a public figure embracing the fact of his homosexuality. I have not read the sixty pages of notes at the back of the book, but a few glances have shown me that many of the notes are highly detailed. The bulk of the book is aimed at the general reader. The notes beckon the scholar and reward curiosity. I have one or two caveats. When Ramsay Clark attended the meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, sitting near Frank Kameny, Clark was no longer Attorney General. He'd served in that position during the Johnson Administration. Nixon was well into his presidency at this juncture, but Eric Cervini refers to Clark as Attorney General, pointing out that security had to be beefed up because of his presence. I can well believe security would have been heavy with an ex-Attorney General in attendance, but, inasmuch as the crowd at the meeting became violent, Cervini should point out that Clark was, by this time, a private citizen. There is another point in the book Cervini refers to the date, January 16th, 1971. He then says, "A few months earlier, president Johnson had signed a bill that permitted the residents of the District of Columbia to send a nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives." No, that was Richard Nixon, who signed that bill (the District of Columbia Delegate Act) on September 22nd, 1970. Nixon was sworn in as President in January, 1969. I thoroughly recommend this book, though. Many decades have passed since the Mattachine Society was one of the handful of organizations helping gay men and lesbians. Perspective has been gained. Arguments over whether the Mattachine Society had any cause and effect relationship on the Stonewall riots won't be answered by me. I don't know the answer. But THE DEVIANT'S WAR tells an inspiring story. It makes me hold my head a little higher; not because I'm especially proud of myself, but because the people who sacrificed their careers to support the Mattachine Society faced odds I can't imagine. They make me feel better about humanity....more
I'll add more to this later, but I wanted to mark this as read. I also wanted to say that this was simultaneously more accessible and more poetic thanI'll add more to this later, but I wanted to mark this as read. I also wanted to say that this was simultaneously more accessible and more poetic than I expected it would be. And now that I have time to write this, here is the rest of my review: After the first few pages, I thought I was going to have great difficulty figuring out what was going on at any given interval. I wouldn't say things started to fall into place, the way they do in Shakespeare. (I calculate it takes about eight minutes, watching a Shakespeare performance, to get my bearings.) What built up, relatively early, though, was emotional resonance. I realized Woolf was going to let me care about the characters. That in itself may put some readers off of this. "What?" such readers may say. "I wanted something forbidding; a vast jigsaw puzzle shaped from our anxieties." Words of comfort: It will seem, sometimes, at intervals, to be just that. But TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is a story after all, with a beginning, middle and end. Often, with books from the early-to-mid twentieth century, I am left wondering what I am supposed to feel. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is a story about family life. I understand THAT might put a reader off. Don't worry. A book where someone shouting "There is no God" is a HAPPY moment cannot be all bad. I don't think Woolf is trying to make us atheists. One character is ashamed to believe in God. That is, atheism, becoming, in the early 20th century, an acceptable option, becomes an orthodoxy itself. Woolf doesn't belabor it, but belief versus nonbelief is one of the struggles between two of the characters. Now I'm making it sound like an intellectual muddle. It was just such an impression that has kept me from reading Virginia Woolf. Now that I've read this, I see that she is rather warm, loves fairy tales and the Arthurian legends and, in a weird way, does something for England. And I'm from America! Maybe there's a reason Eudora Welty did an introduction. (Obviously, not all editions come with that.) In fact as I read this novel, I noticed that Faulkner would have related to the family dynamic here. (I haven't read Welty's introduction yet, but I will after I post this review. Perhaps I'll add some thoughts on Eudora Welty's thoughts.) ...more
I'm going to give this four stars out of Goodreads' possible five. It is a time capsule. If you are looking for footnotes, a bibliography, cross-referI'm going to give this four stars out of Goodreads' possible five. It is a time capsule. If you are looking for footnotes, a bibliography, cross-references or anything like proof that the author experienced the things she said she experienced, you will not find it. But if you have an aesthetic sense, and some intuition, I believe you will agree with me that this memoir has the ring of truth. Very briefly, Francie Schwartz describes her time rising in the advertising world in Manhattan and Los Angeles in the 1960s. That she found herself with enough money to make a trip to London in 1968 so as to put a screenplay into the hands of a Beatle is almost beside the point. The chief merit of BODY COUNT is that it is a prototypical example of a type of writing which flourished at the time and which has since disappeared. Published in 1972, it anticipates Erica Jong's novel FEAR OF FLYING (which came out a year later), and Judith Rossner's 1975 novel LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR. GOODBAR was made into a film in 1977. Another book this reminds me of was also made into a movie in the seventies, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. Ken Kesey's novel came out in 1962, but its view of the cruelty of psychiatric wards is much the same as that in BODY COUNT. As I read BODY COUNT, I kept thinking of PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, by Philip Roth, and I was pleased to see that, toward the end, someone perusing Francie Schwartz's manuscript tells her it is a "female PORTNOY." PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT came out in 1969. I mention these books because BODY COUNT, a book about promiscuity, hints at themes each of these other books have. While at times boastful, the sexual antics become frightening. I'm not certain the intention was to frighten, but when Schwartz describes her time visiting pickup bars on Manhattan's Lower East Side, I couldn't help thinking of the terror in LOOKING FOR MISTER GOODBAR. Schwartz winds up, midway through the book, spending several months in the psychiatric ward at Roosevelt Hospital. That's where she genuinely deals with the horrors the mentally ill are subject to. The sexual revolution Francie Schwartz describes must be hard for people born after, say, 1975, to imagine. The AIDS crisis, becoming known to the world in 1981, brought about dramatic changes in sexual behavior. I think one reason many Beatles scholars dismiss what Francie Schwartz says on ANY subject is that the sexual environment she details is now alien. Schwartz considers herself a feminist, but the feminism she experienced was one of casual sex with successive partners. But readers blinded by the bravado with she describes her sexual encounters should look carefully at the chapter set in the psychiatric ward. She is not blind to the self-destructive side of the erotic life. The book itself is unbelievably hard to find. I found a free download. Amazon wants $375 as a STARTING price. Abe Books's few copies go up to more than a thousand dollars. My download was missing pages 14-15 and pages 34-35. But the Beatle chapter was completely intact, as was the rest of the book. I may write an essay about Francie Schwartz. (What you're reading here is a book review.) If I write an essay, I won't put it out there until I fact-check it. She's given a few interviews and I gather she's said more about the Beatles over the years. I won't address that in this review, or the veracity of what she says in this book. All I will say here is that there are some very well-written lines. Here is one: "His eyes were the same color as the desert sky and his face would have looked hard and rugged if it hadn't also been so young. He had a slight limp which all his other movements contradicted, especially when he tossed his hair from his face." She can write.
I read this play in the anthology BEST MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE PLAYS OF THE MODERN THEATRE, edited by Stanley Richards, published in 1971 by Dodd, Mead &I read this play in the anthology BEST MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE PLAYS OF THE MODERN THEATRE, edited by Stanley Richards, published in 1971 by Dodd, Mead & Company. (I found it in my local public library. If you're having trouble finding a copy, a library is likely to have it in an anthology.) It was under the title ANGEL STREET, which was what the play was called in its Broadway production of 1941-44. If the Broadway version of the play differed from the West End version (which opened in Britain in January, 1939), I must apologize for referring to the American iteration. The play was called GAS LIGHT in Britain and, in 1940, a British film studio made a movie out of it called GASLIGHT (one word.) While that is now considered a classic, the much more famous movie of it was made in Hollywood in 1944 and is generally considered a great movie. The British version is much closer to the play and I was very entertained with it and impressed. The Hollywood version changes the circumstances around but retains a great deal of the play. The advantage of the Hollywood version (which starred Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman) is that, as an acting duo, they convey a sense of tragedy absent in the first film. But the first one is more focused. One thing both movies have which the play does not is a scene, more or less in the middle, in which the couple at the center of the drama go to a piano recital. The action therefore leaves the house. I checked IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base) and, from what I can see, Hamilton's play was used but he himself didn't work on either screenplay. The piano recital in the British GASLIGHT is much in the mode of the rest of the play, and in the Hollywood version it fits in well. In both films it establishes character. In any case, the play's chief merit is its believable delineation of an abusive marriage. There are some plot points with the detective which strike me as somewhat implausible - lotwhat implausible, if I may coin a term, but we always know who to root for. I won't go into the plot. You can see that in Goodreads' thumbnail description. I will address the term "gaslight." In 2021 (the year I'm writing this) "gaslighting" is an oft-used political term. This play popularized the term, but, for more than a half-century, it was basically used to describe personal relationships in which one person tries to make another person doubt himself to the point of being unable to make decisions. But "gaslighting" is an extremely effective political practice now. I won't tell you what side I'm on politically, but I will say that it is ONE particular side doing the gaslighting in our present era, and this play certainly reminds me of what has been done to my country ever since that orange...Oh, I gave it away! Read this play, watch the movies, listen to the radio production you'll find on Youtube, starring Vincent Price. Watch the taut staging by Brighton University Drama Society in 2019. This play, a good, psychological thriller, has proved unsettling in its grasp, in microcosm, of a political future its author could only guess at. (Then again, Hamilton wrote the play just before his country fought a war against fascism.)...more
[Update to my review: To clarify what I just wrote here, I'll point out that I'm reviewing the Kindle edition, which replicates the Valancourt Books e[Update to my review: To clarify what I just wrote here, I'll point out that I'm reviewing the Kindle edition, which replicates the Valancourt Books edition from 2014. You may be seeing a different cover.] First point: Goodreads really ought to identify the author by her real name and not the pseudonym which ceased to be on the cover of this book decades ago. Her name is Gillian Freeman. She used the pseudonym Eliot George for contractual reasons when the book was first published in 1961. Note that Goodreads's default image of the Kindle edition says "Gillian Freeman." The introduction also explains that the pseudonym was used because Gillian freeman had an obligation to a "rival publisher." Given that homosexual behavior was a punishable offense in Britain in 1961, it would be natural to think the pseudonym was used because of the fear of controversy. But Freeman's own name was used when she wrote the screenplay for the 1964 movie of THE LEATHER BOYS. Homosexuality wouldn't be decriminalized in Britain until 1967. THE LEATHER BOYS is a relatively short novel and it is written in clear prose. It was commissioned by the literary agency Anthony Blond, which became a publishing house. Gillian Freeman had been a reporter, and it shows. The agency told her they wanted a "Romeo and Romeo" story and that it should be in a working-class setting. (I got a lot of information from Michael Arditti's introduction to the 2014 Valancourt Books edition and from reviews of the movie, which I was lucky enough to see in an online showing recently. The movie's getting a lot of attention lately.) The characters make horrible decisions, as in every Kitchen Sink drama, but everything is described realistically and the pacing is swift. The book depicts London just as it was about to swing. So, it does not swing here. The characters are feeling the post-World War Two restraints and they are in a dead-end financially. But there is humor and, in moderate doses, tenderness. The courtroom drama is very believable. The book is a time-capsule but it is not dated. It's quite good. Above all, it is a perceptive work. The last paragraph is just right....more
I won't go into the plot. Obviously, THE GRAPES OF WRATH is an extremely famous book. Goodreads has a plot summary. I'm going to address style. PublisI won't go into the plot. Obviously, THE GRAPES OF WRATH is an extremely famous book. Goodreads has a plot summary. I'm going to address style. Published in 1939, toward the end of the Great Depression and just before the start of World War Two, it hit the bestseller lists at a time of tremendous portent. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1940, and was adapted to film that same year. That that film is one of the most well-regarded of movies is well-established. It solidified the reputation of its director, John Ford, and made its star, Henry Fonda, iconic. This novel is political, and made a major impact on America's view of itself. And yet, somehow it is not thought of as a book which made change. I would argue that the only American book which really brought about change was UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. (Lincoln said to its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, "So YOU are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.") What Steinbeck did, though, was crystallize the imagery and mood of the Great Depression. As the book goes along, it is fairly clear Steinbeck KNEW the photographs and paintings of chroniclers of Depression America. Just as we do, he had visual (and, indeed, musical) models as he created the great prose work about one displaced family. It's apparent he knew, and talked with, Diego Rivera. It goes without saying that Steinbeck, who visited migrant camps, learned about and was friendly with, labor figures. His book is of a piece with the songs of Woody Guthrie and the plays of Clifford Odets. But there is a realism no adherence to political doctrine could have taught him. In one chapter, he displays a fondness for the grotesque rivaled only by Thomas Mann. A one-eyed man is described. Politics goes out the window. Tom Joad, one of the main characters, tells the one-eyed man he feels sorry for himself. This bolsters our idea that Joad has pride, but I think the one-eyed man is in the book because Steinbeck wanted to get ghoulish. Steinbeck knew a lot about biology. An early chapter about a turtle crossing a street is an example of his eye for nature. A passage about Ruthie Joad, who is about six, commandeering a game of croquet in one of the migrant camps is a brilliant study of childhood behavior. I'll also point out that Steinbeck, who wrote at a time when a huge proportion of American readers would have known the bible well, named his suffering protagonists the Joads. The name Joad sounds a lot like the biblical name Job. They suffer as much and as often as he did. Prose flows in THE GRAPES OF WRATH. The 21st century to be halting and self-conscious is not a factor in Steinbeck. People parody Steinbeck's glamorous contemporaries Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner. But Steinbeck never shows off. When he describes action, he is plausible. His dialog is believable. Readers may be put off by the insertion, between the action chapters, of oracular chapters, usually about three or four pages each, during which the omniscient narrator speaks about the mood of the country. But these chapters, in themselves, are rather colorful and punchy. They could be excised with no damage to the rest of the book. But I think Steinbeck put them there to give the reader a breather. The story itself is heavy. It appeals to the conscience by showing the burdens put on people who toil from dawn to dusk. THE GRAPES OF WRATH is sometimes funny. But the funny moments are sewn into the overarching story of hard lives. Very few writers can pull this off. John Steinbeck came along at a time of great challenge and great strength. Other books from its era tend to deal with people meeting hardship. But Steinbeck's powers of observation are keen. He is almost invariably truthful....more
Perhaps because I've tried, and failed, to write a book like this, I find my cynicism confirmed in MONTAUK. If Frisch is trying to damn himself in thiPerhaps because I've tried, and failed, to write a book like this, I find my cynicism confirmed in MONTAUK. If Frisch is trying to damn himself in this memoir I'm not sympathetic. It's stylistically interesting, but it strikes me as the product of an unfeeling egotist. Frisch's portrait of his best friend is mean. He behaves atrociously to his wives and his mother. But there is a practical problem: These stories of broken relationships are essentially unfinished and are wrapped in the larger narrative of a brief romance. That story itself does seem to have depth. That's what makes MONTAUK a good book. But I didn't like what Frisch did to his old friend or to his mother or to his wives or to his children. A writer can say the most terrible things about himself, but if there's no self-reflection he's not in the company of Joyce, Dante or O'Neill. But the fling Frisch describes is described dispassionately. He's not settling a score in this instance. The rest of the book is self-serving....more
I have given this book all five stars. This does not mean I liked it very much. But I'd be dishonest if I said I didn't think it was fully realized. II have given this book all five stars. This does not mean I liked it very much. But I'd be dishonest if I said I didn't think it was fully realized. It is a comic work in the tradition of Bret Harte and O. Henry, but with considerably more depth than anything by either of those authors. It strikes me that John Steinbeck had a classical sense of form. ...more
This review of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW will not merely contain spoilers but be one. No sane discussion of this book will fail to give away key points. The eThis review of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW will not merely contain spoilers but be one. No sane discussion of this book will fail to give away key points. The entire thing is a soufflé. I stick a pin in it and it will pop. But it will still be edible. Imagine this book as yet unread. I can tell you what I thought of it, but if you haven't read it, it will still be, for you, an unpopped soufflé. Yes, I will tell you my thoughts on GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. Think of it this way: I'm coming out of a restaurant. I recommend the soufflé. Just because I tell you about its surprising delights doesn't mean you won't feel the same surprise and delight as you taste the soufflé put before you. So, my enjoyment of the dish I just had shouldn't take away from your experience. One thing you should remember, of course, is, you may not WANT any soufflé after you read about what the characters in this 776-page waddayacallit put in their mouths. But does reading MOBY-DICK make a reader want to go whaling? Not this reader! Read on, MacDuff: That's as far as I go in trying to mimic the tone of this book. Already, I can see, from what I've written, that I simply fall into the hipsterism that Pynchon himself is never actually guilty of. I am not being facetious when I say that GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, strictly as prose, is unrivaled in American literature. Pynchon has to have had role models, but he avoids their mistakes as surely as he avoids those of his contemporaries. From my own reading experience I can say that, if Thomas Pynchon takes a cue from Melville, he categorically rejects Melville's chief flaw: The convoluted sentence. Let's say bomb-making is to GRAVITY'S RAINBOW as whaling is to MOBY-DICK. Both authors know more than 99 per cent of readers will about the professional activities of the characters in their books. Melville, of course, DOES give you something of a course in whaling. But he wants us to appreciate what a man on a whaling ship does. Pynchon knows the reader already hates physicists. (Who does one admire more? A man pulling on a rope for thirty minutes in order to raise a sail that weighs a thousand pounds or a guy in a sweaty suit working a pencil to a nub for eighteen hours?Both men are necessary to world-shaping industries. But we like the sailor automatically. We want to mock the thinker.) That both authors are describing essentially destructive industries is clear. Read MOBY-DICK again if you haven't already. It is about a world that eats its own. So is GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. Both books condemn an industry which sacrifices drones. (Ahab is not merely getting his men to join him in his mania; he has commandeered the ship HIS masters have entrusted to him. He despises the profiteers. If the fat cats allow the suffering of scores of men on each ship they send out, he, at least, will make sure the men suffer for HIM and not THEM.) MOBY-DICK and GRAVITY'S RAINBOW make the case against plutocracy. Pynchon's sentences flow, always. Melville's do so with less frequency. This leads me to another point: Because Pynchon is of our time, it is easy for us to miss that he is a very different cat from, say, Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson is saying "Here is how things look when you're on acid." Joseph Heller, wildly funny in CATCH-22, is trying to convince us of the absurdity of bureaucracy. Vonnegut, who certainly sees the world chained to the military-industrial complex, is, nevertheless, a believer in simple kindness. Not so for Pynchon. By the way, he is still alive. As of this writing - March of 2021 - he is about 84. Hunter S. Thompson would be Pynchon's age if he were still alive; Vonnegut and Heller were of the generation featuring in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. I had simply assumed Thomas Pynchon was about 96. One of the canonical novels of the Second World War was written by someone who, by all chronological indications, should have been writing about Woodstock. Instead, he delves into the mind of a morally compromised hard scientist working on rockets for the Nazis at a base just a mile from a concentration camp. And HE is the sympathetic character. (Not that he's the protagonist; but his story seems to me to be the heart of this book. It is at the very center, and I think this is deliberate. His story works as a novella. Stefan Zweig could have written it, but he killed himself during the Second World War. He was the author of THE ROYAL GAME, about a chess master. Pynchon could have written that if Zweig hadn't.) That section of the book seems to me to be in the German tradition. It is Expressionist; a literary equivalent of something by Mahler. Another reason Pynchon's prose might not seem to the average good reader particularly spectacular is that he uses the present tense. Everybody uses it now. Before about 1970, the present tense was used as a sort of parody of stage directions. (Melville and Dickens use it that way.) But by 1985 or so every think piece in the NEW YORK TIMES was written in the present tense. ("I'm trying to tie my shoe, but I keep thinking about Iran-Contra!") Pynchon uses it without pointing to it, somehow. I think, then, that Pynchon speaks the lingo, but from a deep source. I have never seen English used with such precision as in his book. While much of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is hallucination, I feel quite sure it is not meant to describe hallucination. It is, in itself, hallucinatory. I only got about thirty per cent of what I read, but as with the parts about physics or bureaucracy, when what was going on at any given moment or from paragraph to paragraph eluded me, I never got the sense that I was being asked to conclude that something was definitively the result of, say, drunkenness. This may not seem important, but, because the action is confined to (or, at least, goes no later in time than), 1944-45, I can't say, as one would when reading Ken Kesey, "Oh! This is LSD." Much of the kick of sixties and seventies literature was a Pied-Piper call to mind-altering substances. Thomas Pynchon is not interested in that. The hallucinatory quality of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is closer to fantasy writing than to De Quincey. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is not of a piece with the drug advocacy of its era. Its ethos is not "Tune in, turn on, drop out." It's not even akin to A NAKED LUNCH. It is about human nature. It deals with depravity and atrocity. It is a fundamentally German novel, written in British English by an American at a time of existential terror.
The French original was published in 2015. I read the translation by Lorin Stein which was published that same year in the United States. I gather theThe French original was published in 2015. I read the translation by Lorin Stein which was published that same year in the United States. I gather the UK had a DIFFERENT translation. So, bear this in mind: The English-language translation I read may be different from the English translation you read. I read this just a month after the United States capitol was ransacked by a right-wing mob. SUBMISSION contains a pretty detailed description of life at a time of political violence. It resonates with me. One passage describes a tense moment when the protagonist is anticipating a march led by Marine Le Pen, the real-life leader of the National Rally party. If she were an American politician, her followers would be the same people who attacked the US capitol on January 6th. Fundamentalist Islam has a strong foothold in France. SUBMISSION deals with an apolitical professor who finds his lifelong indecision untenable. France is either going to go nativist or theocratic. The nativists are only superficially Christian. The theocrats are Muslim. His secularism, corroded by hedonism and informed by sexism, has left him lonely and hollow. SUBMISSION shows the changes he undergoes when France becomes an Islamic state. Several of the political figures in the background of this novel are real people. The only names I know are Le Pen and Macron, and, of these two, Le Pen is the one whose views are clear to me. She'd be a Trump supporter if she were American. (God knows she's one anyway, even if she's a French politician.) My guess is Macron is a moderate. I have no idea if he is more left than right. I think he's still the leader of the land. I point this out to make the larger point that this novel must be more accessible to someone who follows French politics. I can say that SUBMISSION is generally about the death of secularism. Controversies surround the book and its author, but it seems to me he has novelistic gifts having nothing to do with his views on politics or religion. When Houellebecq describes the main character's relationship to his parents, he reminds me of John Updike in the nineteen seventies. He is sardonic, resigned and bittersweet....more
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